Verbal Guile

Beware the Deceptive Euphemisms that Hide Insidious Evils

Benjamin Franklin defined a diplomat as someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. While I would never recommend Mr. Franklin’s suggested destination to anyone, diplomatically or otherwise, I get his point. With carefully chosen words and phrases, resistant minds can be opened to receive hard-to-sell concepts. Nathaniel Hawthorne agreed, saying, “How potent for good and evil [words] become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

Masking Evil

The adversaries of truth, who abound in our culture today, have mastered this subtle art of combining easy-to-swallow words to sweeten poisonous ideologies. They have become expert at releasing into our midst hideous evils masked in euphemisms—high-sounding phrases that make horrific acts seem palatable or even desirable. For example, on first hearing the phrase “death with dignity,” one might think it promotes a fine thing—efforts to assure that a dying person is treated with the utmost care and sensitivity. A well-meaning but uninitiated bystander would never suspect this innocent-sounding phrase to be a cover for the immoral and possibly illegal act of helping a person commit suicide.

The idea of “marriage equality” certainly sounds laudable, but it doesn’t mean what you might think—that both partners in a marriage should be recognized as equals. It means redefining marriage so that men may marry men and women may marry women. “Gender-affirmation therapy,” also called “gender-affirming care,” hides the outrageous practice of injecting hormones into normal—often prepubescent—bodies to alter sexual characteristics and then cutting away healthy sex organs to reshape them into grotesque parodies of the opposite sex. How many businessmen have been corrupted by accepting “soft commissions” instead of bribes? How many consciences have been quieted by watching pornography under the label “mature entertainment”?

A recent Washington Post article discussed a newer euphemism: “sex positivity.” On hearing the term, one might think it’s a fine thing that someone is promoting a more positive attitude toward sexuality than the one we inherited from overly prudish ancestors. But the term means nothing like that. It embodies the writer’s claim that “all forms of sexual expression between consenting adults are permissible and should be destigmatized.” It’s a cover for no-holds-barred sexual anarchy.

Perhaps the most insidious euphemism of all is “pro-choice.” On the surface, the term appears not only innocent but outright positive. What could be wrong with protecting the right of us humans to exercise our God-given free will? We see this reasonable-sounding term bandied about so much that it’s all too easy to gloss over it without thinking about the appalling evil of the choice it promotes—the diabolical “freedom” to kill, at will, the most innocent and defenseless of human beings.

Grave Deceptions

Euphemisms have their place. They can spare feelings in the face of harsh or unpleasant facts. To be “between jobs” may preserve one’s dignity a bit better than being “unemployed.” To say, “she is unique” is kinder than saying, “she is weird.” “He’s frugal” is more diplomatic than “he’s cheap.” Even the Apostle Paul used “sleep” as a euphemism for death.

But the problem with many euphemisms we encounter today is that their purpose is not to cushion our sensibilities but to deceive us. More to the point, they are designed to enable us to deceive ourselves by providing a verbal veneer of innocence to cover insidious or deadly practices.

It’s not likely that anyone is fooled by the euphemisms covering these prevalent evils. Most of us have been sufficiently exposed to them to know what they really mean. The real danger is that these euphemisms can dull our sensitivity to the gravity of the terrible ideologies they cover. They give their proponents an illegitimate aura of respectability that tempts us to constrain our opposition to them. We must learn to counter rationally, firmly, and without hesitation when challenged with questions like, “How can you possibly oppose giving women the freedom to choose what happens to their own bodies?”

The Hard Rocks of Reality

We must be frank: killing a human either at the beginning or the end of life is a form of murder, even under the guise of “choice” or “death with dignity.” Calling for “marriage equality” will not enable two bodies of the same sex to achieve the natural physical blending required to meet the true definition of marriage. Gender-affirmation therapy will not restore normal sexual function to a gender-dysphoric teen, but it may well permanently damage her healthy body.

The bottom-line truth we must keep before us is this: camouflaging evils with euphemisms does not alter the fact that endorsing evil means butting our heads against unalterable realities of creation. Euphemisms won’t protect anyone’s head or soul from the resulting damage.