A Word And A Defeasible Tactic

     Certain words, as all my Gentle Readers already know, have been anathematized: driven out of the common lexicon by censorious P.C. evangelists. I’ve written about this before. But those actions have evoked reactions in many cases. One of them is the contemporary practice of condemning the individual’s privilege of discerning better from worse, or good from bad, or right from wrong. That is denounced as judgmental.

     Really? We’re not supposed to use our ability to discriminate – whoops! another banned word! – between what’s pleasant and unpleasant, constructive and destructive, ethical and unethical? Yes, really, Gentle Reader! We’ve been commanded to give all that up in the name of tolerance! It’s about “the freedom to be me,” don’t y’know!

     Well, pardon my Urdu, but fuck that shit.

     Turning “judgmental” into a pejorative is part and parcel of the Left’s Newspeak campaign. As Orwell noted, restricting our vocabularies restricts our ability not only to convey a concept or a sentiment, but even to formulate it for ourselves. We think in symbols – words – and without the appropriate words, some thoughts become impossible to express.

     I am judgmental. I know what I believe and what I prefer. No censorious leftist will deprive me of the words I need to express those things. But they’re working hard to browbeat as many Americans as possible out of their most expressive terms. “Judgmental” is only the mildest of their pejoratives.

     Now that denunciations as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” and so on have lost their force, “judgmental” is on the rise. Confident persons will laugh it aside… but appallingly few of us are confident in the face of an attempt to shame us. We’ve been hectored and battered for so long, and from so many directions, that the common inclination is to “self-censor” to avoid such sallies. That such attempts are themselves “judgmental” rarely occurs to us.

     A quick “blast from the past:”

     [A]llow me to recount an episode from more than a decade ago. It occurred at the home of some friends, who had invited us over for dinner. They’d also invited another couple, about whom I’d been told nothing except that the husband, Abe, was someone “you might enjoy talking to, Fran.”

     Abe was a left-liberal of typical left-liberal opinions and arrogance. We fenced verbally for an hour or more — apparently our mutual friends had told him a little about me and my proclivities — during which:

• The topics were many and various;
• Abe repeatedly made factual assertions I could easily disprove, but which he insisted were true, while freely dismissing my factual assertions as “nonsense;”
• Despite severe temptations to do otherwise, I remained courteous. I was in someone else’s home and felt an obligation to maintain the peace.

     But there came a point where Abe felt he simply had to address what he deemed the inadequacies of President George W. Bush. Now, whatever Dubya’s missteps were — and I’ll allow he made a number of them, some of which were quite serious — he was a man of sterling character. You could believe that he meant what he said. When he proposed a plan of action, you could be confident that he was sincere about it and would prosecute it to the limit of his ability and authority. When Abe lit off in that direction, I could sense that trouble was on the horizon.

     And indeed it was. I managed to hold myself in check throughout most of Abe’s tirade, but when he sneered at Dubya for his Christianity — for “needing the comfort of an imposed structure,” as Abe put it — I snapped.

     “Do you have any idea,” I said in a tone that might have issued from the bowels of the Earth, “what you just said to a devout, practicing Catholic?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned on my heel and walked away. We exchanged no further words that evening. Indeed, my wife and I left without wishing him a good night.

     Abe, who was clearly an evangelistic secularist – lots of leftists are like that – saw fit to judge Dubya for his embrace of Christianity. Whatever anyone may think of Dubya as President, his faith was sincere, and was sincerely demonstrated on may occasions. When I riposted at him, he was dumbstruck. I’d counter-judged him, and he was helpless before it.

     There’s a moral in there, Gentle Reader. They who denounce us as “judgmental” cannot face their own fire when it’s turned against them. In a way, it’s a reprise of what’s happened to the Left’s previously preferred pejoratives: when turned against them, they were unable to respond coherently. Some foamed at the mouth; others simply fell silent.

     I think the point has been made: stand your ground. Have a nice day.