Words matter. We don’t like people telling us lies or half truths. Businesses and agencies spend billions on advertising, presenting the advantages of their products or policies, disguising or ignoring the defects, the downside. When politicians or public figures do this, we accuse them of spin. We brand the best as champion spin merchants.
Sometimes the problem becomes deeper. When the public takes up these ways of thinking, then the truth is distorted, or presented as so true it cannot be questioned or denied.
Let me give some examples. When the public debate began over the weather temperatures ten or twenty years ago, many spoke of the “greenhouse effect”. A friend of mine used to grow his orchids in such a glass house and we understood the extra heat generated inside and feared for the polar ice caps.
“Global warming” became the preferred term in the absence of dramatic deterioration and as global temperatures did not rise again in the last decade “climate change” replaced global warming as the preferred term.
So today those who doubt that human activity changes global weather are often libelled as “climate change deniers”. In fact no one denies the climate can and does change.
Because the word is spreading that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant we are now urged to reduce our “carbon footprint”. But carbon dioxide is different to that carcinogenic black stuff on burnt toast. It is easier to black guard carbon than carbon dioxide.
Global warming provides the worst examples of propagandists capturing the language. But we find others.
The small but powerful homosexual lobby which is battling to undermine the proper privileged position of marriage refers to homosexuals as gays. In fact there is no evidence they are happier than the rest of the population.
So too it is often implied that all discrimination is unjust. But everyone discriminates regularly and discrimination is essential to every society and especially societies which cherish freedom.
We all choose our friends and society imprisons criminals. The best students are chosen for demanding university courses and only our best athletes represent Australia.
The practice of groups, including churches employing staff who support their aims does not need “an exemption” in law, but the protection of the basic right to freedom of choice and association, and to religious freedom.
Much discrimination is just. No one claims the Labor Party must employ Liberal Party staffers.
The name game can have unfortunate consequences when we get it wrong.
