Everyone knows “words matter.” It is easy to forget that who else is using the same words matters too. Everyone who shares an argument creates connotations. I’ll give you a personal example before I move on to the log cabin republicans and other issues.
I have an ex-brother-in-law. One of his explanations for why he left his wife is that he just did not find non-blonds sexually attractive enough. So six children and the time together meant less to him that someone who could make a convincing bleached blond, as he once explained it.
I have some understanding. While I like the look of red hair, I find it anti-erotic. Very strongly anti-erotic. If I had married a red haired woman, I would probably be childless today. But when I hear arguments about how sexual attraction is essential to bonding and satisfaction, the arguments are contaminated in my mind by my ex-brother-in-law and the number of men I’ve know who traded in their wives for younger models.
The argument in that context has become the victim of semantic contamination.
I’ll give another example that applies to people in the Church. The Ensign appeared to have a goal of an article a year or so on depression. One of the themes that they want to communicate is that while situations and environment can contribute, most depression, especially suicidal depression, is a physically based mental illness. Most suicides are not morally culpable (meaning that committing suicide does not equal damnation). That is a solid meme. It occupies and controls space in the LDS frame.
When there is a suicide and someone tries to place blame for it, many people hear the message “he was driven to suicide, killed himself and is now damned and it is your fault.” That translates further to “I’m blaming you for his sins” and “depression is morally blameworthy, not a physically based mental illness.”
As you might expect, people who make blaming arguments get the response “quit being histrionic” (perhaps in kinder tones) or “quit being silly.” The mental illness meme, strongly adopted to comfort the families of suicides (and confirmed over and over again as true by the Holy Ghost to those who provide such comfort) creates a contamination when someone tries to assert that a suicide is not the result of mental illness.
Closely allied to semantic contamination is context contamination. Take “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.” 39% of the people who exit the military under DADT are women accused of being lesbians who have no impact on combat units, nothing to do with community showers, and whose orientation surfaces in the context of their being victims of sexual harassment (women are far less than 40% of the military population). 50% of the DADT exits are racial minorities (racial minorities are about 30% of the military). That context contaminates any discussion of other reasons for enforcing DADT.
If you want to speak to people, and be heard, you need to use arguments that are not tainted with semantic contamination. If you want a policy to be accepted, you need to fashion it so that in application it does not have significant impacts that are clearly outside of its proposed application and rational. Purity is as important for virtue or power in argument as it is in every other sphere.
Wheat & Tares 
I really like this idea. I am fascinated by the use of words and actually read grammar books for fun.
There are many loaded phrases in today’s world (and it appears that politics has been reduced to just using the phrases without any context behind them). I agree that it is important to be cognizant of semantic contamination – at times to avoid it, but at other times to take advantage of it.
Great post.
BTW,
http://hbr.org/2010/10/managing-yourself-how-to-save-good-ideas/ar/1
But when I hear arguments about how sexual attraction is essential to bonding and satisfaction, the arguments are contaminated in my mind by my ex-brother-in-law and the number of men I’ve know who traded in their wives for younger models.
Never underestimate a midlife crisis. Middle-aged straight men, pathetic creatures that they are, panic when they first glimpse their horizon of sexual viability. They’ve been coddled and praised their whole lives, and middle age is the first time they get to experience what it’s like not to be the pinnacle of creation. The sensible ones take up ridiculous but harmless hobbies like skydiving or mountaineering. Others embarrass themselves with new sports cars and hair replacement treatments. The truly, truly sad cases throw away their decades-long marriages and start over with a younger (and almost always) blonder woman.
Sheesh! You straight people are making a hash of marriage. You need gay people to come in and rescue this moribund institution just as they have for you in areas like music, art, culture and technology.
MoHo – I would LOVE to see a post with advice from a gay man to straight men on how to avoid mid life crisis (or at least deal with it gracefully).
#4- I second that! Lol!
@Stephen
I wish you were in my old branch, they still talk about suicide like you are possessed by the devil.
We had a poor sister get up and bear testimony in Relief Society talking about her son who just died from pancreatic cancer and how differently she feels about it because of the gospel. She said she felt better about her other son who had committed suicide, and no longer than she got the words out another sister told her, her son was fill of the devil.
I was extremely pissed that no one in the RSP said anything to this woman. So, I did and basically, I told the woman to shut up.
I had to walk the sister who was talking about her son to Bishops office because she was really upset, she was trying to bear testimony and here some one was telling her her sons’ were full of the devil.
I second the guest post by mohohawaii.
Otherwise, I am hopeful that more people will approach discussion with more awareness. And that I will find mobile devices easier.
Re #4, 5, 7. OK. Send me an e-mail telling me where you want the draft sent, and I’ll give you the philosophies of men, mingled with style tips.
About the OP, another example of semantic contamination is the death penalty. It turns out that murderers of white victims are *far* more likely than murderers of black victims to be sentenced to death, among other disparities in application.
And it turns out that black persons who commit murder are far less likely to get the death penalty than white persons who commit murder.
The clear solution (since most murder victims die at the hands of a person of their own race) is to execute more black people. But that would ignore the critical question of what kind of murders different ethnic groups tend to specialize in.
The statistic MoHoHawaii cites is usually held up as evidence of “a black person’s life is worth less.” Not true. The disparity fades to insignificance when you control for type of murder. See, black murderers (speaking generally here) tend to specialize in ordinary decent murder — shooting convenience store clerks during a robbery, gang killings, etc., whereas white persons are disproportionately represented among the truly awful serial-killer type of torture-killing.
@)3
Not to start an argument, but if a straight male said those kinds of things about a gay man, I know you and a few others would be the first to raise an uproar.
Re #10,
From Amnesty International: A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white.
To be clear, the statistics mentioned in here and in #10 just serve to point out that the death penalty is one of those things that is hopelessly entangled with related issues. You can’t just talk about it in a vacuum, which I think is the point of the OP.
Re #11
So true, so true. Having your vanity ribbed by an outcast is one of the real disadvantages of ruling the world. :- )
Gee, just read this:
http://www.fairblog.org/2010/10/12/go-west-young-man-and-sex-ratios/
Ask yourself how many of those statements raise hackles from the way their presuppositions are intertwined with modern thinking.
“If you want to speak to people, and be heard, you need to use arguments that are not tainted with semantic contamination.”
Just read the post, things have been busy of course… I need to think/learn more about this but it’s rather intriguing, if a little out of my reach.
Stephen is [intemperate statement from Stephen’s personal popcorn popping troll]. Moderated, as always with this particular troll, to make up for their lack of grace.