GOP Response to Losses: Word Games?!

NBC News reports that the party that spent the last presidential term swooning over Trump as supposedly some kind of natural Alinskyite has decided to borrow yet another page from the left's playbook: relabeling.

Never mind that conservatives routinely make fun of the left for doing exactly this: They seem to think that they can go from making fun of, say, the "alphabet brigade" every time a new letter or symbol gets added to LGBT one moment -- to changing "pro-life" to some term-to-be-named-later for their anti-abortion crusade -- the next. And without anybody noticing:

Image cropped from screenshot of the Center for Reproductive Rights, I believe this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion. [(!) --ed]

"Many voters think ['pro-life'] means you're for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and 'pro-choice' now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they've shifted. So if you're going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific," Hawley said Thursday.

Has Hawley seen a map of where abortions remain legal lately? (Blue, above.)

The piece is mute on whether Hawley, who helped confirm anti-abortionist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, offered any more specifics as to what his own position on reproductive freedom might be, or which specific legal stand on abortion his party should stake out and clarify.

Let me help.

Either a fetus is a human being, and all abortion should be outlawed as murder, or it is not, and abortion should be treated under the law like any other medical procedure.

I support the second position, but I could at least muster some respect for an opponent who would openly state and offer a rational justification for even the former position.

But that is not the kind of "specificity" that surfaced in the Republicans' closed-door meeting:

Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., summarized Wednesday's meeting as being focused on "pro-baby policies."

Asked whether senators were encouraged to use a term other than "pro-life," Young said his "pro-baby" descriptor "was just a term of my creation to demonstrate my concern for babies."

How insulting and infantilizing is that? At least leftists occasionally appear to have semi-plausible reasons for changing their sleazy terms. This, to use a term even Hawley might understand, is as subtle as a fart in church.

The reason voters react differently to the term pro-life these days is because, with Roe overturned, there is now a real danger -- as seen in the numerous Republican states that have banned abortion since -- that a "pro-life" "pro-baby" (i.e., anti-abortion) politician will be able to do the same if elected.

In other words, previously Republican-leaning voters, who used to feel safe ignoring the term "pro-life" now know they can't.

Voters know this, and they'll still know it if and when anti-abortion Republicans -- too cowardly to state their actual aims openly and too sneaky to give up on them -- relabel themselves in the same way leftists relabeled "corporate responsibility" to ESG, or "global warming" to "climate crisis" not too long ago.

-- CAV