Over the course of a few days in mid-January, the U.S. Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”) heard oral argument in a major Title IX case, a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing about the danger of chemical abortions, and Pope Leo gave an address to foreign diplomats. What do these disparate events have in common?
All three expose the importance of truthful communication and the real-world danger of the abuse and misuse of language. At SCOTUS, lawyers and justices referred to boys and men with feminine pronouns, and used nonsensical words like “cisgender” and “transgender”; in the Senate hearing, an obstetrician from an elite medical school refused to answer the question, “can a man get pregnant?”; and in his address, the Pope lamented the loss of shared meaning in the words we use.
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