Immediately after being sworn in this month as the new governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order eliminating the word “Latinx” from official government use.
It’s a step in the right direction. While neither the government nor society should make a habit of outright banning words, they also shouldn’t inject extraneous, fringe jargon where it never belonged in the place. And few phrases feel more fringe than Latinx. According to a 2020 Pew Research poll, only 3% of Hispanics use the term, and a whopping 76% had never even heard of it. Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinas overwhelmingly find “Latinx” bizarre, if not downright offensive (actually, a late 2020 poll revealed that 40% of Hispanics do take offense with the term).
Sanders isn’t the only leader returning common sense to everyday language. In December, the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines banned the use of preferred pronouns in its 17 schools and 80 parishes. Of course there was outcry: Despite the move being cheered by Catholic school parents across the state, Iowa Democratic State Sen. Claire Celsi took to Facebook to decry, “These schools want public dollars and want to treat kids in a way that might cause them to commit suicide,” and “This is not what Jesus would do.”
Today, the left’s idea of free speech has become coerced speech. Their woke babble — manufactured by outlier ideologues with too much time on their hands — insists that mainstream interpretations of reality, culture, and even our own bodies is flawed and needs to be corrected.
This is not the role of government. Whenever a Republican governor puts the brakes on the excesses of the left — like ending sex ed for kindergarteners or removing a silly word like Latinx from official vernacular — social justice types are all too giddy to cosplay as libertines. “Here’s that fascism we warned you about,” they’ll squeal, imagining themselves part of a digital, gender-neutral march on Selma.
If other states were to follow Arkansas’ lead, a few more examples of loopy lingo ought to be tossed into the bin. For starters, it’s time to purge the newfangled ‘Q’ from LGBTQ. It stands for “queer,” and aside from being a slur that many gays and lesbians find offensive, queer is neither a sexuality nor gender identity but a fashion statement and cry for attention. While you’ll find plenty of middle of the road LGBTs and Hispanics, you won’t find many who identify as queer, or Latinx — and that’s a good barometer to determine if a word belongs in representative government, or is merely extremist mumbo jumbo.
The same can be said for the term “cisgender,” which translates to “not trans” and is a sort of a mind-control effort thrusted forth by the gender cult. It’s nice to be respectful of people’s differences—and we ought to try—but we don’t need to marginalize 99.5% of the population by inventing a new classification that no one asked for— or rarely uses.
When the Biden administration swapped the word “mothers” for “birthing people” in a 2021 budget proposal, radical activists cooed with delight. This was done, we’re told, to protect the feelings of trans men who have babies. The same illogic applied to a recent case in Washington State whose Department of Health refused to use the word “woman” in an ad promoting cervical cancer awareness. In both cases, any woman who questions this craziness must need re-education, leaders who worship at the altar of woke tell us.
But trans men (biological females who identify as men) get pregnant so rarely, a camera crew shows up every time it happens. The reason for this is simple: Pregnancy would be very traumatizing for most trans men living with gender dysphoria. In fact, many do everything possible to avoid it. Which is why there’s no need for the White House to cram words together like puzzle pieces to coddle this improbable identity.
Then there’s the seemingly ubiquitous BIPOC, or “black, indigenous, and people of color,” which first appeared around 2013 and is an acronym with explicitly political goals. So much so that in 2020 The New York Times even asked if BIPOC “is doing its job?” What job might that be? No one tries to hide it: to manufacture a common experience among all nonwhite people in America to orient them toward a specific political agenda in service of the Democratic party.
The left is aware, and somewhat ashamed of, just how un-liberal they’ve become. But they can’t help themselves; they’re addicted to power. What they fail to realize is when you start to weaponize the government to control how people speak, it creates a dangerous precedent that may come back to bite you. So far, the Republican governors who’ve pushed back have shown a level of restraint. The left might learn a thing or two from that.