It's not just about promoting catchwords like the "death tax" -- Republicans have also been fighting to suppress words deemed overly liberal.
Bisexual sustainable development activists working to prevent climate change-related sea-level rise better watch out: Just about all the preceding words have been flagged by conservatives and Republicans as liberal buzzwords that need to be stricken from public conversation, according to a spate of recent news stories.
Sure, it's a time-honored GOP practice to seek to replace a perfectly good description, such as "the estate tax," with a more inflammatory phrase, but the new fight against liberal words does not appear to be seeking to replace them with an alternative so much as to deny the existence of a thing. Three examples:
1. "Bisexual" and "transgender."
The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that Romney's administration couldn't countenance these words during his later years in office, when he was preparing for a presidential bid:
Former governor Mitt Romney's administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state antibullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms "bisexual'' and "transgender'' in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.Romney aides said publicly at the time that publication of the guide had been delayed because it was a lengthy document that required further review. But an e-mail authored in May of that year by a high-ranking Department of Public Health official -- and obtained last week by the Globe through a public records request -- reflected a different reason.
"Because this is using the terms 'bisexual' and 'transgendered,' DPH's name may not be used in this publication,'' wrote the official, Alda Rego-Weathers, then the deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
2. "Sea level rise" and "climate change."