Verbal Plunder: Against the Feminist Encroachment on Language, Theology and Ethics

      I don't like being ripped off.

      The  more valuable something is to me, the more I hate to lose it.  As a historian of theology and as a literary critic, I value words and their meaning and I value tradition.  I won't give them up without a fight.  If some folks want to steal something from me and I can stop them, I will.  This essay is my way of saying that I’ve had enough, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

       Not long ago, a small and vocal band of feminist thugs tried to pull off one of the greatest acts of verbal plunder in the history of the Western world.  By means of a linguistic subterfuge that prohibited any term that happened to strike them as sexist, they tried to abscond not only with 1/3 of all our generic personal and possessive pronouns (No more “he” and “his,” for example.), they also tried to swipe any and every descriptive term beginning with the letters m-a-n.  And, because crime breeds crime, they fell quickly from larceny into slander by identifying as sexual bigots and chauvinists anyone, past or present, who failed to pay homage to their idiosyncratic rules of usage.  As much as I hate to endorse anything to do with Freudianism, it seems to me that some feminists suffer from acute pronoun envy.

     But I will not be bullied out of my words or my heritage by the verbal, philosophical, or cultural heresies of those who are dedicated to undermining the great tradition that brought us the good, the true, and the beautiful, on the one hand, or redemption and hope, on the other.  I know what that mob of word pirates is up to, and I want to tell them to keep their hands off my legacy and to stop spreading lies about my friends.  Anyone who thinks that Jesus, Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, or Milton were sexist pigs simply because they did not speak, write, or paint according to the aberrant rules propounded in the latest feminist manifesto had better think again.  Some people not only have no respect for their own language and tradition, they have none for anyone else's.  They smear those who, in ages past, “spake full well in language quaint and olden,” people whose verbal art and commitment to truth I am unwilling to abandon, condemn, or reshape in some generic mold of feminist design.  I do not trust the minds and methods of feminist teachers who, by means of their anachronistic slurs, bear false witness against the past and its towering figures.  Nor do I want them teaching my children.  I  will not entrust my descendants to those who abuse my ancestors.  Wisdom, beauty and truth are hard won things, the gaining of which took generations.  To overthrow them or to undervalue them simply because those who discovered them do not worship at the altar of one's own linguistic special interest group is both insupportably arrogant and reckless.

     More than 1500 years ago, in his monumental City of God, St. Augustine understood the principles by which modern propagandists operate:  if you want to undercut an opponent's argument, simply compromise his language.  This is done best by stealing your opponent’s words and making them your own.  When you do so, your opponent is forced either to stop and explain what he means every time he uses the words you co-opted, or else to find a whole new set of unfamiliar terms with which to advance his case.  Either option is doomed to failure.  Neither audience attention span nor media sound bites are sufficiently long to accommodate his necessarily lengthy and labyrinthine efforts at re-educating the populace to his newly acquired taxonomy.  By stealing his language, you have stolen the verbal flags and banners around which he can rally people to his cause.  Without those flags and banners he is speechless.  By pilfering his verbal arsenal, you have left him without weapons and without defense.

     That is precisely what the feminist word thieves are trying to do.  They have taken traditionally generic terms of representation like “he,” “his,” and “mankind” and redefined them so that they can be understood only as sexist or gender specific.  In much the same way that weasels suck the contents out of eggs, the feminists suck out all the content of words.  Then they go the weasels one better.  Rather than leaving the empty shell of a word behind them after they have emptied it of its previous meaning, they proceed to refill that mangled word with a definition of their own choosing.  For example, according to one prominent feminist handbook, the “only acceptable non­sexist usage” of the word “man” is in reference to an adult male.  But that is a feminist weasel word, one from which the feminists have sucked out its prior meaning and replaced it with one of their own.  According to my  Webster’s Dictionary, the word “man” is not a male word.  In fact, the concept of maleness does not enter until the third definition.  Contrary to the self-serving assertions of the feminist verbal revolu­tionaries, traditional usage is not ideologically patriarchal in either definition or usage.  For my money, Noah Webster is a far better guide to language than Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan or Starhawk.  My point (if it is not obvious) is this:  rather than having a command of language, the feminists want to command language.

     Read my lips: I'm not buying it.

     I will defy all those who insist on taking the language and the literature of Western tradition to the verbal veterinarian in order to have them neutered.  Not all changes are progress, and neutered language is one of those changes that is not.  Neutered language is no improvement.  It is not more accurate, more picturesque, more powerful, or more communicative.  Neutered language is not preferable.  None of us is better off because standard word usage has been castrated. 

        Feminists insist on rejecting traditional verbal usage because they think it is exclusivistic and that it leaves out half of humanity -- namely women.  Their response to this imaginary impropriety is to represent the human race in neutered language -- which merely succeeds in eliminating all of us, because human beings are not androgynous, and they are not neuter. 

        If you look carefully, you will discover that much feminist language is not inclusive.   You also will notice that a great deal of feminist language (and the ideology that accompanies it) is not neutral; it is overt feminist sexism.  I don't know about you, but I've had enough of books like Jesus as Mother.  If any change is needed now, it is to have feminist language and literature spayed.  I intend to be a recruiter for, and a front-line warrior in, the resistance movement determined to stave off the feminist encroachment upon legitimate verbal conventions, and I intend to be an environmen­tal activist in the fight against semantic pollution.  I will stridently oppose all those whose verbal fetish is exposing the supposed genitals of standard English.  I, for one, will not be party to the humorless, even unhuman, triumph of Feminist androg­yny, and I will not sanction the willful blindness of those who insist upon seeing only the imaginary sameness of all things, because things that are all the same, whatever else they might be, are not human beings. 

     Have the feminist word bandits never learned that grammatical gender is not the same as sex?  One does not make a sex statement when one calls  the race "man" any more than when one calls a ship or a nation or liberty "she."  Genitalia are not in question.  Sex and grammatical gender must not be equated.  If you insist on equating them when the author you read or the speaker you hear has not, you will misread or mishear.  In that sense, some feminists can misunderstand in seven languages.  Their verbal fetishes make it inevitable.  In their monomaniacal quest to expose the verbal genitals of every great writer, they miss the beauty and truth and power of the world's finest works of verbal art and, in the process, make themselves beggars and complainers at the great feast of language and literature.  Their ill-conceived sexist jingoism does little else than make them whistlers, hecklers, and foot stompers in the rhapsody of words played out for us by the finest verbal performers of all time.  I, for one, am scandalized by their audacious efforts to teach the old Muses new tricks and by the manner in which they pretend to stand in ideological and artistic judgment over them.  Great words and great works judge us, not vice versa.

       As a grammatical category, the concept of gender first reached maturity in ancient Greece, where it seems not to have developed as a reference to sex, but rather as a classification of kind.  Must I remind feminists that while there are only two sexes, Greek has three genders (a distinction of which the Greeks were well aware and heartily endorsed.)?

      Furthermore, the same non-sexual character of grammatical gender is repeated in modern language.  In German, for example, the word for “girl” is grammatically neuter while the word for “turnip” is feminine.  This does not mean that the Germans confuse their women with their vegetables.  Such ideas are laughable to us because when feminist  propaganda is not blaring in our ears we easily understand that grammatical gender is a semantic classification and that a semantic classification is not the same as biological sex.  You must not impose a sexual orientation upon words where one does not exist.  

        If the words "man" and "mankind" were really male words, then it should be the men, not the women, who ought to be offended by the use of allegedly male terms to refer to the race indiscriminately because by employing a masculine word for a generic meaning our culture would be demonstrating that it thinks nothing at all of defacing or erasing maleness.  If generic words really were male words, then masculinity is being defaced everyday by everybody -- and no one seems to object, least of all the feminists.

      The feminist word fetish sometimes reaches ridiculous extremes, as even the feminists themselves have had occasion to acknowledge.  The Nonsexist Wordfinder actually feels compelled to stop and remind its feminist readers that the words “amen,”  “boycott,”  “Manhattan,”  and “menopause” are not sexist words!  I never thought they were; but apparently enough feminists did so to  require such a warning.  

    The feminist verbal agenda is the academic equivalent of an urban renewal project:  it is intended to clean things up and to modernize them, but all it does is to serve as the seedbed for future blight.  The feminist wrecking crews long ago began to demolish the venerable landmarks of language, literature, and theology.  They intend to replace the Victorian richness and character of our language’s architecture with the androgynous homogeneity and boredom of the cinder block, steel, and glass ugliness of endless rows of antiseptic, off-white, cloned cubicles of androgynous language.  They want to replace the hallowed halls of ivy with the long, gray, dimly-lit corridors of an ill-conceived, allegedly gender-neutral taxonomy. These inhospitable corridors they will pervasively and perpetually serenade with a politicized, propa­gandized, amorphous Muzak that permits you to hear all the notes, but never the music.  The feminists intend to level the great books, the great authors, and standard English just as thoroughly as the Allies did Dresden.   The great tragedy is that the feminists have met with so much success and with so little resistance, especially in political affairs and in the affairs of academia.

    We are the victims of a feminist "Newspeak" that is designed not to portray or to depict reality more accurately, more graphically, or more comprehensively, but simply to meet the ideological needs of feminism and to further its own radicalized political agenda.  The unabashed purpose of feminist Newspeak is, to paraphrase George Or­well, not merely to denigrate standard English, but to make the worldview of standard English impossible and, literally, unthinkable.  This is done partly by means of new words, but primarily by means of junking the old words, or by stripping them of their old meanings.  Feminist Newspeak is designed, to paraphrase Orwell again, to diminish the range of human thought and to make it impossible to formulate in one's mind what feminists misrepresent as the moral heresies and injustices of Western tradition.  

You see, because thoughts and words are so intimately interconnected, when someone steals some of your words, they also steal some of your ability to formulate, or to conceive, certain thoughts.  The fewer the number of words from which you have left to choose, the fewer the number of thoughts it is possible for you to think and to express coherently or compellingly.  In the aftermath of the feminist plunder of the English language, anti-feminist arguments and reasons become impossible because the words and thoughts necessary to conceive and to sustain those arguments have all been stolen.  Language control is thought control.  The feminist Newspeakers are trying to induce a culture-wide case of selective amnesia; they want you to forget major portions of the accumulated wisdom of many centuries of Western tradition and of the language in which it was conceived and preserved so that you will more willingly drink deep from the boiling cauldrons of cultural and theological heresy, and of feminist social revolution. 

Make no mistake about it, the feminist word warriors are thought police.  They will confiscate your words -- and your thoughts -- and they will deface those words and thoughts they leave behind.  Feminist Newspeak is not merely a form of ideological censorship, it is verbal plunder and mental vandalism.

That is my first point -- the feminist word warriors have damaged English language and literature.  My second point is that they have done the same thing to theol­ogy and to ethics.    

       They've even kidnapped God Himself and had Him neutered.  The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have been exchanged for God, Jesus, and the Spirit, as if the Son were not God, as if the revelation in Scripture could be altered at will, and as if heresy were a trifle.  They had better re-read St. John and the creeds of Nicea and Chalcedon.  When Christ taught his disciples to pray using the words "Our Father who art in  Heaven" (Matthew 6:9), He was not being an unreconstructed chauvinist simply because He wisely refrained from employing the neutered language of the New Lectionary.  My point here is not merely that Jesus spoke of God as Father, but that He apparently never spoke of Him as anything else -- and that matters.

      Jesus did not merely continue the patriarchal theology of the Old Testament, He widely and deeply intensified it.  In the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures, God is almost never actually addressed as “Father.”  He is described as “ Father” only occasionally.  But Jesus himself alone calls God “Father” more than 160 times, and except for the cry of dereliction on the cross, which is a quotation from the Old Testament, Jesus never calls Him anything else.  The feminists, in other words, are fighting with Christ, and they must be made to realize this.  We not only have Christ’s explicit instruction to call God “Father,” we have His constant example.  I remind you that no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals Him, and the Son has revealed Him to us as Father.  If you reject that revelation, then, in some profound fashion, you can not know God.  If you reject that revelation, the God you know is somehow other than, and different from, the heavenly Father of Jesus.  As Adolf Harnack observed, Jesus did not make God our Father, He showed us that God is Father.  

     Put differently, in their mad efforts to rid orthodox Trinitarianism of what they mistakenly identify as sexism, feminist theologians have junked the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and replaced them with the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer.  That is, they have replaced divine ontology with function, which is a heresy.  After all, it is not only the Father who creates; it is not only the Son who redeems; and it is not only the Spirit who sustains.  Each of the three divine Persons is intimately involved in each of the three functions arbitrarily singled out here by the feminists as the means of distinguishing and identifying the Persons of the Godhead.  This feminist subterfuge is no more helpful than distinguishing the right fielder, the left fielder, and the center fielder as the one who runs, the one who throws, and the one who catches, respectively.  All outfielders do all things.  To jettison the the three Persons of the Trinity in favor of three arbitrarily selected functions of the Trinity is simply to fall into a new variation of the old Sabellian heresy of modalism, which denied that God is authori­tatively revealed to us as three Persons, but which affirmed instead that God merely fulfills three functions and plays three roles.  It seems to me that to be baptized into the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer is to be baptized into an­other religion, and not into Biblical or historical Christianity.

       But the feminists are not only Sabellians, they are Marcionites.  That is, like Marcion, they too have utterly rejected the authoritative witness of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Like Marcion, the feminists denigrate Yahweh and they despise the picture He gave of Himself  to pious ancient Jews in the Old Testament.  Furthermore, they despise the picture those pious ancient Jews have left of God for us.  The feminists ac­cuse the ancient Jews of doing, indeed severely criticize them for doing, precisely what they themselves unashamedly do:  remake God in their own image.  The feminists reject the God of the Jews because they think He is merely the culture-bound product of a political and sexist agenda.  I reject the God of the feminists for precisely the same reason.

      Winston Churchill is reported to have said that whatever name the Iranians choose to call their country, in English it ought to remain “Persia.”  Likewise, whatever tortured pronouns the feminists invent to refer to God, the good theologian will continue to call Him “He.”

      Feminist theology, I am convinced, is a flight from Biblical reality.  God has made us male and female, not androgynous.  God has made the male of the species not  better, but head.  God has revealed Himself to us as He.  When God became incarnated, He became a man, that is, a male.  That Man is the source and model of the Christian priesthood.  The sexuality of Christ is neither accidental nor incidental.  It is the result of divine choice.  If you don’t like it, argue with God.

      In his excellent The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom pointed out that Western scholars properly criticize the loss of academic integrity among their Soviet counterparts, who seem to revise their textbooks every time a new regime comes to power.  Whenever the academy capitulates to the whims of government or of modern culture, Bloom says, it is the death of learning.  Because theological feminism has merely baptized the gender fixation and egalitarian political agenda of the feminist left, theological feminism is the death of genuinely Biblical learning.   Even though it some­times means not to be, feminist revisionism is anti-Scripture.  Too many feminist the­ologians believe that when the Church listens to the Bible the Church becomes de­formed, not reformed.  They are wrong.  The feminist theologians have yet to learn that it is far better to listen to the Heilege Geist than to the Zeitgeist, that is, to the Holy Spirit of God than to the spirit of the age. 

        But it is not revelation that the feminist theologians crave; it is relevance.  They have not understood that all that is revelation is inescapably relevant, but that being relevant is no guarantee of being revelation.  The feminist theologians have never learned that to go with the spirit of the age is to go where all ages go and have gone:  out of vogue and into a well deserved obscurity in the irretrievable past.  They have never learned that to go with the God of revelation is to go where God Himself goes; and God Himself is never out of date.  As Vance Havner once said, God is the Eternal Contemporary.  Whenever our tomorrows arrive, we will always discover that God Himself has been there before us.

      Theological feminism is simply an accommodation to the spirit of the age, not to the core, not to the kernel, of revelation.  It finds its authority in something called “feminist experience,” and not in Scripture.

      The feminists' linguistic lobby, however, has exercised some discretion.  Although they have stormed the Bastille of language and literature, and although they have laid siege to the Gates of Heaven and kidnapped its Chief Occupant, they have not yet had the nerve to bombard the walls of Hell in order to claim its king as their own.  It's funny how calling the Devil “he” doesn't bother the feminists.  It doesn't strike them as chauvinistic or sexually bigoted to personify evil in precisely the same language they elsewhere label sexist when used to personify goodness.  Nor do they complain on behalf of all little boys everywhere about how psychologically devastat­ing it must be for males to think of evil itself as one of their own kind.  Apparently, pronouns are sexist only if they can be construed as anti-feminist.

           But make no mistake about it, the feminist encroachment on the language of religion and morality is no mere tempest in an academic teacup.  It is far more than the harmless verbal jousting  between grammarians and theologians, on the one side, and women’s libbers, on the other.  It is - - and I do mean this literally - - a matter of life and death.

That is because language is a deadly weapon.

          In the hands of a skilled wordsmith, language can sensitize peoples' consciences to injustice and motivate them to heroic virtue and reform.  In the hands of a propagandist, however, it can be the verbal camouflage that hides some wildly hor­rific crime behind apparent respectability.  When the Nazis, for example, resorted to genocidal barbarism in their quest for a "purer" race and nation, they called on their word warriors to help them cloak their wickedness in the language of decency in order to make the unspeakable speakable.  Dachau and Buchenwald were painted with the brush of inoffensive clinical jargon.  "We have merely implemented," the Nazis said, "the final solution."

     Their word ploy was largely and tragically effective.  Rather than stating the facts plainly and thereby forcing the German people to face the unimaginable horror around them and to risk life and family to eradicate it, the Nazi’s verbal subterfuge provided a respectable wall of words behind which to hide their grotesque villainy.  Who, after all, can be opposed to a "purer" nation or to a "solution"?

     I can.

     Whereas great evils are often disguised by clinical language, accurate words call the ghosts out of the closet.  That is why we must learn to call things by their real names.  That is why we must beware of every feminist euphemism.

       But, even now, decades after Hitler, we fail to speak plainly.  We have succumbed to the feminist word ploy, and as a result, millions of people are dead.

      We let the feminist word warriors hide the fetal holocaust that surrounds us every day just as effectively as the Nazis hid their extermination of the Jews.  And they do it the same way.  They do not permit themselves to utter the "M" word, even though they commit the "M" act.  That is, they do not murder unborn children, they "abort fetuses."  That terminology, they wrongly believe, helps to remove their heinous deeds from the realm of the morally reprehensible.  It allows them to view themselves and their neighbors with more self-respect and ethical complacency.  “After all,”  they say to themselves, “what nice young woman would ever pay her doctor a handsome sum to murder her unborn baby.  That is unthinkable.  We merely abort our fetuses be­cause we are unmarried and do not want to sentence our unfortunate and inconvenient offspring to a life of poverty.” 

       Never mind that such a woman is an adultress.  Never mind that she sentenced her child to the garbage can.  Described in her less graphic and less accurate language, to murder her child seems not only not evil, it seems downright virtuous.  As someone else has said, if you brush away the sentimental slush of a thousand sob-sisters, the cold fact remains that this woman wants to kill the child now living within her.

      Beware of every feminist euphemism.

      Some of the more squeamish among the feminists are unable even to say the "A" word.  Though by aborting fetuses rather than murdering babies the feminist’s linguistic sleight of hand has hidden the real nature (murder) of their action and the real identity (baby) of their victim, some women require a still heavier dose of verbal opium.  For them the feminist word warriors have had to make the accursed deed even more palatable by making it even more impersonal.  They have convinced such people that they are merely "terminating a pregnancy," a phrase which eliminates overt reference to any living thing.  Unlike fetuses and children, which are undeniably alive, and unlike abortion and murder, which seem to imply nasty things like blood and death, simply to “terminate a pregnancy” sounds as innocuous as ending a radio transmission or pulling into the station after a pleasant railroad journey.

        If “terminating pregnancies” is still too shocking a verbal description because the word "pregnant" tends to evoke unfortunate images of happy women large with child, feminist ideologues hide the crime behind an even more impersonal wall of words.  They can say that murdering unborn children is nothing more than the voluntary extraction of the "product of conception."  If that does not work, then they simply talk the way nearly all abortion clinics actually do talk:  They resort to an acrostic and say that they are merely " removing the P.O.C."  What could be more innocent?

     Nearly everything.

     Beware of every feminist euphemism.

     Pleasant words can be a fraud.  A sterile idiom can be a defense mechanism behind which we conceal the grossest reality.  But, defense mechanisms do not change that reality.  They merely disguise it.  The evil facts themselves remain the same.  Never forget that the disease you hide you cannot heal.  For jargon wizards like the feminists, therefore, and for all who have been morally subverted by the feminist’s verbal deception, there remains no therapy.  Rather than facing the facts and identify­ing this slaughter for what it is; rather than calling an unconditional halt to the war they wage on the unborn; rather than confessing their guilt and casting themselves on the immense mercy of God; the feminist ideologues have persuaded millions of women to mask their shame behind a veil of words and to sell their souls to the ver­bal charlatans and quacks who tell them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.  They hide the crime with a lie.

      Because words are inescapably connected to ideas, the feminist abuse of language has given rise to a feminist abuse of moral reason, as well.  Let me illustrate.

      My mother once asked me to clean up the back room in our basement.  Not knowing the magnitude of the task she had set before me, I consented.  When I finally got myself downstairs, I opened the wooden door to the back room, flipped on the light, and saw an unimaginable mess of almost legendary proportion:  paper, beetles, dirt, bowling pins, cardboard boxes, toys, broken tools, rags, and sawdust.  I did what any "rational" 15 year old would do.

     I shut off the light and closed the door.

     I'm not the only one who ever did that.

     Most of us, I dare say, respond to the sometimes ugly face of reality the same way, though after years of practice we have learned to do so with a good deal more dexterity and finesse, so that our indulgent and immoral evasions seem less obvious and less culpable.   Sometimes we try to rationalize our indolence and our guilt by telling ourselves (apparently) rational lies.  That is, rather than looking at the shocking facts and not wincing; rather than seeing those ugly and disturbing facts for what they are, we rationalize.  Though this ploy seems to assuage our consciences mo­mentarily, it does not help.  In fact, it does great harm, especially the way the feminist defenders of infanticide employ it.

       Feminists not only hide the hideous face of abortion behind a verbal veil of inoffensive language and pretty words, they rationalize their wickedness.  They have as many excuses for this barbaric atrocity as they have linguistic feignings to hide it.  For example, one often hears the Right-to-Deathers say horrendous things like "Surely we may terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or by incest, may we not?”

     No, we may not.

     A child does not lose its right to life simply because its father or its mother was a sexual criminal or a deviate.  Of course, rape and incest are vicious crimes.  Those who perpetrate them must be strictly and decisively punished.  Nevertheless, a civilized nation does not permit the victim of a crime to pass a death sentence on the criminal's offspring.  To empower the victim of a sex offense to kill the offender's child is an even more deplorable act than the rape that conceived it. The child conceived by rape or incest is a victim, too.  In America, we do not execute victims.

     The Right-to-Deathers think that my argument here is insensitive to the plight of the rape victim and that I would sing another tune were I myself the victim of such a crime.  They are wrong.

     Because ours is a government of laws and not of men, we must not consign justice or morality to the pain-beguiled desires of victims.  They, of all people, might be the least able to render a just verdict or to identify the path of highest virtue.  I am convinced that the more monstrously one is mistreated, the more likely it is that revenge and personal expedience will look to that person like goodness.  While rape victims most certainly know best the horror and indignity of the crime in question, being its victims does not confer upon them either ethical or jurisprudential expertise.  Nor does it enable them to balance the scales of justice or to satisfy the demands of the moral imperative with care, knowledge, finesse, or precision.  If one was an uninformed or inept ethicist or penologist before the crime, as most of us undoubtedly are, being a victim does not alter that fact at all.  Justice is traditionally portrayed as blind, not because she was victimized and had her eyes criminally removed, but be­cause she is impartial.  Rape victims, like all other crime victims, rarely can be trusted to be sufficiently impartial or dependably ethical, especially seeing that they so often decide that the best alternative open to them is to kill the criminal’s child.  Suffering an evil at the hands of another does not excuse you from the responsibility to acquire knowledge and skill before rendering judgements.  Victimization never has any power, on its own, to restore you.  It is no substitute for courage, competence, or virtue.

     "But, does a woman not have the right to her own body?" the Right-to-Deathers ask.

      Of course she does.  But that is not at issue here.  It is not her body,

after all, that is being murdered; it is someone else's.  Like hers, the body being murdered is not canine, not feline, not equine, and not bovine.  Like hers, it is human.  Like hers, it has a unique combination of 23 sets of paired chromosomes.  (If, indeed, the body in question were truly hers, its genetic code would be the same as that of her body.  It is not.  It never is.)  Like hers, the body being killed is the human product of human conception.  It is not something she may do with as she pleases.  Morality dictates that we do not kill human bodies -- including our own -- for personal convenience.  As John Locke taught us, one of the most fundamental rights of all is the right to one's own property; and among the most sacred portions of our property is our own body.  To it we have an almost exclusive right of function and disposal, a right that no one else can usurp, not even our mothers.

        “But  don’t you believe in abortion rights?”  the feminist Right-to-Deathers ask me.  “Yes,” I reply, “I do believe in abortion rights.  I believe it is the right of every human being not to be murdered by abortion.”      

       John Donne was correct -- because no man is an island, each man's death diminishes me.  That means, among other things, that you cannot diminish the liberty or dignity of one without endangering or diminishing the liberty and dignity of us all.  Abortionists, therefore, attack more than the unborn.  Abortionists, and the feminist word warriors who defend, them must be resisted.  Much depends upon their defeat.  The life you save may be your child's.  The freedom and dignity you save may be your own.  As Confucius observed long ago and far away, when words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.

       To remain free, we must beware of every feminist euphemism and we must unmask every feminist rationalization built upon an abuse of language. 

       The feminists want to dress themselves up with the lexicon of respectability, but it just won't do.  The denigration of Western tradition, the ideological mutilation of standard English, the slaughter of millions of unborn and still defenseless human beings, and the neutering of God Himself are not respectable.  Those things are supremely wicked and they must be stopped.  Feminist Newspeak is simply the diabolical dic­tionary of the anti-God, anti-tradition, anti-human, feminist left. 

       Again, I know what they're up to, and I won't have it.  Theft and murder are despicable. To throw words away or to mangle them unnaturally and grotesquely so that you can do the same to inconvenient human beings is a monstrous wickedness.  Even if I have to stand guard alone, the feminist culture felons are in for a fight.

     So go ahead, murderers, word thieves, and slanderers, make my day.