By CHRIS POWELL
Propaganda is often a matter of names and terminology. For as the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, if you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it or about it. The label itself may settle the matter politically.
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For many years in politically correct places like Connecticut calling people “racist” has been enough to shut most of them up or defeat a proposed course of action. This racket is starting to fail from overuse in part because indignation about supposed racism has failed to lift up the state’s minority population, which remains nearly as poor and segregated as ever even as the people who denounce racism have been running the state for decades.
The propagandistic labeling most in use in Connecticut now involves the Trump administration’s proposal to forbid hospitals from using federal Medicare and Medicaid money for sex-change therapy for minors.
“This is not medicine,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says. “It is malpractice. Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures.”
Noting that the administration’s action is only a proposal, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong replies: “Gender-affirming care remains legal and protected in Connecticut. Donald Trump is not a doctor, and we’re not going to let his cruel political agenda dictate access to healthcare or decimate our hospitals. We are exploring all legal options to protect Connecticut families and our medical providers.”
Yes, Trump and Kennedy are not doctors. But then neither is Tong, and many doctors agree with Trump and Kennedy. Indeed, medical opinion increasingly holds that most children will get over their gender dysphoria if they are not locked into it by “puberty blockers,” hormone injections, and surgeries. Even people who aren’t sure about the best response to gender dysphoria may concede that irreversible treatment is best postponed until children can decide as informed adults.
Contrary to the attorney general’s suggestion, the Trump administration has not proposed to make gender dysphoria treatment illegal. It has proposed only to prevent life-altering treatments for minors from being federally financed. States could spend their own money on such treatments.
Maybe it will come to that in Connecticut. At least Tong has joined nearly all news organizations in the state in the propaganda war over gender dysphoria. That’s what their terminology — “gender-affirming care” — is about.
The neutral and accurately descriptive term here is “sex-change therapy.” Calling it “gender-affirming care,” as the attorney general and the news organizations do, euphemizes it to presume that there is really no controversy at all, nothing to be questioned — that the desire of minors to change their sex should automatically be “affirmed” with “care.”
After all, who could be against “care” except people who, as Tong says, have a “cruel political agenda”? People who disagree with him on this issue couldn’t be sincerely concerned about troubled children, could they? They must be drooling MAGA freaks, and maybe racist too — right?
Or else the attorney general is a demagogue and is being sustained by news organizations that prefer politically correct demagoguery to being fair.
NEW HAVEN’S BRAZEN CONTEMPT: New Haven city government’s contempt for the public interest in accountable government has gotten more brazen.
A few weeks ago Mayor Justin Elicker, who is also a member of the city’s Board of Education, defended the board’s decision not to perform a written evaluation of the school superintendent, only an oral one conducted in secret. The mayor said it wouldn’t be productive if city residents knew much about how she was doing.
Now, according to the New Haven Independent, the Elicker administration is mocking the public interest again. It is performing written evaluations of city department heads but only insofar as the evaluations say “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” There are no specifics.
Should the department heads improve in some way? The public isn’t to know or have any way to judge.
New Haven is proudly the most liberal jurisdiction in the state, and this is what liberalism has come to.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 