Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders expected pushback on her Executive Order issued last week, and she got it. Not surprisingly, it came from “pride” groups who have lost their minds and common sense.
“Women are women” opens her EO issued last Thursday. “An XX chromosome is an XX chromosome. The science is clear and real.”
Accordingly, she prohibited all governmental offices, departments, boards, and commissions in the State of Arkansas “from using exclusionary, sexist language” in their documents, such as using “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women.”
Rather than “chestfeeding,” use “breastfeeding,” rather than “body fed” or “person fed,” use “breast fed.”
And so on.
In announcing the order, Sanders expected pushback:
Some on the left will accuse us of being nitpicky, that Arkansas should just lay down and accept the cultural revolution without complaint.
I say it’s the exact opposite. It’s the left that decided that “woman” is a dirty word.
Sure enough, Dolores Wilk, the executive director of Central Arkansas Pride, ranted that Sanders’ EO “is very exclusionary to nonbinary and trans people.” She went on:
This is science. The human experience is more than just biological male-female. There are third genders, there’s multiple identities, and that concept is critical to the human experience.
And if anyone is versed in medicine and mental health, they will recognize that.
She went further:
Birthing is done by non-binary people such as myself, trans-men and other genders. I feel like a second-class citizen with this type of language and I am here fighting today for my non-binary and trans-community.
Happily, Sanders’ Surgeon General countered such nonsense:
As I was taught in medical school — and actually, have known since I was five years old when I happened to be looking through my mother’s nursing school textbooks and ran into some embryology textbooks — women give birth.
The ACLU, however, weighed in on the side of insanity:
Governor Sanders’ executive order is yet another attempt to erase trans people. It is a regressive and desperate step that ignores the rich tapestry of identities and experiences that make up our diverse state, employing divisive rhetoric that only serves to stigmatize and exclude transgender and non-binary Arkansans, as well as those who do not fit within traditional gender norms.
This order dismisses the valid concerns and experiences of marginalized communities and effectively attempts to erase their identities.
Ten years ago, the ACLU claimed to defend the concept of free speech: “Protecting free speech means protecting a free press, the democratic process, diversity of thought, and so much more. The ACLU has worked since 1920 to ensure that freedom of speech is protected for everyone.”
But not anymore. Now, free speech stands for anything that supports the “woke” agenda and stands against any challenge to it.
A leaked memo in 2018 revealed the change that came from the top:
[Our] work to protect speech rights may raise tensions with racial justice, reproductive freedom, or a myriad of other rights, where the content of the speech we seek to protect conflicts with our policies on those matters, and/or otherwise is directed at menacing vulnerable groups or individuals.
If Marxists can change the meaning of words without resistance, then all communication is not only impossible, but any communication can also be used to promote its agenda. As Benjamin Dierker, writing for The Federalist in 2018, noted:
This isn’t innocent linguistic drift or slang; it is a conscious effort to reshape society. The schemes include redefining words for personal gain, using modifiers to alter the meaning of a word, replacing technical words with colloquial ones, and creating new words.
Each of these is a bullying tactic, which distorts effective discourse.
It is more than a “bullying tactic”; it is part of the Marxist program to fundamentally change the culture through the gradual degradation of the language, replacing old familiar words with new ones. From Marxists.org comes this:
Marxism holds that the transition of a language from an old quality to a new does not take place by way of an explosion, of the destruction of an existing language and the creation of a new one, but by the gradual accumulation of the elements of the new quality, and hence by the gradual dying away of the elements of the old quality.
Sanders was correct when she said, “It’s the left that decided that ‘woman’ is a dirty word. It’s the left that decided that we needed [new] basic biology and basic grammar [change] to go along with it.”