 |
| George Orwell |
State Representative Jillian Gilchrest, a Democrat from West Hartford, is vigorously supporting a legislative proposal that would, according to a piece in CTMirror, “ban religious objections to reproductive health care in Connecticut.” She is “one of several lawmakers who recently unveiled legislative priorities for reproductive rights.”
Christians, anti-Christians and practical atheists will note
the distortion in language here: Reproductive rights – that is, abortion rights
– rarely result, when broadly exercised, in the reproduction of the species.
The expression “reproductive rights” is used most often on the left as a
euphemism for “abortion rights.”
Gilchrest and a supportive group in the State’s General
Assembly, the legislature’s Reproductive Rights Caucus and Reproductive Equity
Now censors, are likely to be disappointed once their legislation, if passed,
wends its way through appellate courts that regard the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution as more than a passing fancy.
Three rights are bundled together in the Constitution’s
First Amendment: religious rights -- “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” – freedom
of speech and the press – “[Congress shall make no law] abridging the freedom
of speech or of the press” – and freedom of association and petition --
“[Congress shall make no law affecting] the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court transfer to states
the imprescriptible rights affirmed in the First Amendment. The “Congress shall
make no law” clause applies as well to state legislatures and municipal
governments.
Any criminal worth his salt may be familiar with the
doctrine "Nulla Poena Sine Lege"
-- where there is no prohibitive law, there can be no punishment, a bedrock
concept in criminal law ensuring fairness and predictability that protects
individuals from arbitrary prosecution.
“Reproductive [abortion] rights advocates are eyeing a
change in state law that would no longer allow medical providers to deny a
patient reproductive [abortion] health care based on a religious or
conscientious objection,” CTMirror advises. The “change in state law” advocated
by Gilchrest and abortion rights advocates in the General Assembly,
dispassionate observers will note, is incompatible with the First Amendment.
“To combat these refusal laws in the state,” officials from
Reproductive Equity Now wrote in a memo, “Connecticut [legislators] can act to
ensure health care institutions, such as religiously affiliated hospitals, do
not prohibit providers from providing medically accurate information regarding
a patient’s health status, counseling, and referrals for care that may not
align with an institution’s moral or religious beliefs.”
Rhetorical contortionists will admire the misuse of language
here by officials from Reproductive Equity Now. What has abortion, the
termination of life in the womb, to do with “health care”? Are not most laws –
say, laws that punish bank robbery, rape and incest – “refusal laws”? Should
bank robbers and bank tellers be treated equitably because both handle cash? And why should religious hospitals -- doctors, nurses and staff – be stripped of
their First Amendment rights , their “moral or religious beliefs,” so that some
legislators may with an unbruised conscience feel free to violate what used to
be called the religiously informed conscience of individuals luxuriating in
their First Amendment rights. Would members of Connecticut’s media settle for
an originalist interpretation of the freedom of speech and the press clauses of
the First Amendment if advocates who favor neo-progressive rights were to
agitate against the wide berth of freedom afforded to members of the media by
the First Amendment?
It was liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg,
close friends with Justice Antonin Scalia, who reminded her colleagues “We are
all originalists now.”
“It is morally obtuse and unconstitutional said Chris Healy,
the executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, “to require a
health care provider to perform an abortion or any medical procedure that
conflicts with their religious rights as well as the religious tenets of the
provider. There are plenty of options available to women, but the abortion
lobby can’t control their extremism and want to dictate to people of faith. Catholic
hospitals are the targets, and we will vigorously oppose it to protect the
religious rights of dedicated health care workers.”
George Orwell, who remained a socialist all his life, considered
himself a custodian of the English language – and so he was. When he submitted Animal Farm for publication, it was
rejected by one prominent publisher because, “We do not publish children’s
books.”
Orwell’s Politics and the English Language
is well worth reading even today – most especially today.
“In our time,” Orwell writes, “it is broadly true that
political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found
that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not
a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless,
imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading
articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost
never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches
some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases –
bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the
world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is
not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which
suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind
them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of
phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The
appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved
as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is
making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be
almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.”
In the United States, the orthodox neo-progressive left
makes use of its own hackneyed and deadening -- pun intended -- phraseology.
Orwell’s undying message is -- corruption, in all its
various guises, follows the corruption of the language.
Comments