The latest in the series of pamphlets published by the Life Ethics Centre is Donald DeMarco’s He/She? Inclusive Language and its Consequences.
It is obtainable from the Life Ethics Centre, 53 Dundas St. East, Toronto, Ontario. (See advertisement on page 24), at 70c a copy, or 10 for $7.00.
Feminists argue that sexist language is noxious language. “Avoiding he,” they say, “is equal to talking down the ‘whites only’ sign in a restaurant.” Commenting on the Vatican instruction, Peter Hebbiethwaite writes, “You will have to forgive, if you can, the sexist language here.” The Metropolitan Separate school Board in Toronto discourages the use of the generic “man” because it “perpetuates the invisibility of women and contributes to the concept of a woman as a subspecies and inferior person.” But, as DeMarco shows, what is involved is not the rectification of a past injustice, but the imposition of an ideological jargon whose purpose is to compel ideological allegiance to feminism.
How are you going to get rid of terms like manhood, newsman, forefather, brotherhood, and fatherland? As DeMarco shows, the synonyms proposed for them do not have the same connotations at all; they simply will not do. And are we really supposed to avoid words like virtue and virtuoso, derived from Latin word for man?
It is the attempts to rewrite Scripture and change liturgy that some of the bitterest disputes arise.
Mary Malone asserts that “in the language of the Church, women do not exist.” Rosemary Ruether declares that “patriarchal theology… uses the parent image of God to prolong spiritual infantilism as virtue…” Those who accept such complaints enthusiastically have wrought terrible havoc in the language of the Church, producing such imbecilities as “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Child, that whoever believes in that Child should not perish but have eternal life.” Even a former moderator of the United Church of Canada has exclaimed, “Surely Christian women aren’t so insecure and self-conscious as to require a de-sexing of Jesus in order to relate to His message.” I have not really dealt with the central points DeMarco makes concerning the relation between thought and language. His aim is to show “that truncating the language, particularly of words that have non-sexist, inclusive meanings, is a futile, if not counter-producing enterprise.” Feminists will be uncomfortable for seeing that their campaign for linguistic equality is essentially an ideological invention, the produce of bad history and bad logic.
