The reason Republicans and conservatives consistently lose on social issues is because we accept and use phrases crafted by liberal academia and media that are intrinsically complex question logic fallacies. For example, if a conservative accepts and uses the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life”, they’ve already lost the debate before it’s begun.
Language is the single most important issue facing conservatives today. It’s why we are losing the legislative, judicial and public opinion battles over abortion, immigration, family matters, education, entitlements, demographic issues, and more.
For example, to simply use the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” is to imply that abortion is OK; that “pro-choice” people want to let everyone choose, and “pro-life” people are simply a sub-set who choose against it. That is how the issue has been legally treated since 1973 by both sides of the aisle. The language the conservative side of the aisle should use instead is, “we are against taking an individual’s life.” We should should make a point of rejecting the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” in conversation and correcting them to be “for taking individual’s lives” and “against taking individuals lives.”
The same principle applies in the definition-of-marriage debate. If we use the term “homosexual” as a noun instead of an adjective we are implying that a person can actually “be” their behavior. The truth is that all people have the gift of sexuality and simply decide how to use it. Using the terms “homosexual” or “gay” to define what a person is implies that the channeling of sexuality isn’t what someone does; that it’s not behavior. It also implies that a person choosing to use their sexuality in a given manner should be able to have that method of use protected as a special status, the same as protection for an inherent trait such as national origen . The terms a conservative should use instead are , “a person who practices homosexual behavior,” or, “a person who behaves homosexually.” If we were careful to always make this distinction between people’s actions and what they are – simply fellow individuals – the entire nature of the debate would start to change.
Another example of terms that imply a false pretext are the words “race” and “racial”. Any good anthropologist will tell you that that there is no such thing as a separate human “race”. Instead, we are all of one race – the human race – and we all have familial traits and cultural identities. As far as variations of skin color, hair type, etc., you can never break down people into buckets on that basis because for every shade of skin tone or color of hair, etc., you will always find one tribe, one family, one person on the earth who is exactly in-between the trait you are trying to differentiate on. Now racial thinking is a hard problem to correct because everyone has been conditioned in society to identify with racial distinctions and to use racial language when talking about demographic issues. A good way for conservatives to start correcting this, though, would be to start replacing racial language with phrases that call out the specific situation or cultural identity and nationality being discussed. “Discrimination on the basis of skin color…” “Reparations to descendants of chattel slavery…” “Segregation on the basis of skin color…” Etc.
