Which? Be clear, because the only ones I hear you dogwhistling here are Trans folks rights or Black folks rights if you are vaguely referencing "social issues" and generally America's historical context there is Pretty Dang Bad.
There is nothing dogwhistleable here, US leftist race policy is a huge outlier in the Western world and I would hesitate to call it "liberal". Once someone groups people into racial groups and treats them like interchangeable Lego bricks by color, they have left any pretense of liberalism, which by necessity considers an individual to be the smallest and most vulnerable minority of them all.
That’s been shared a lot on social media but those posts tend to leave out the context that this was only in technical language around IVF, not a broad change, and that it was intended to resolve confusion around what “mother” means in the context of what goes on a birth certificate in the case where a same-sex couple means the child has two mothers.
Thanks for clearing that up, it really changes the story for me. This actually came up as only 4% reported by the left in Ground News' weekly Blindspot Report [1][2]. It only lists one left-leaning source, also from USA Today [3], but not the one you linked, one critical of the measure. I guess Ground News really didn't help here in guarding against bias. That's pretty disappointing.
I get being against this sort of thing, but it’s wild to me how people are SO against something so inconsequential (official language on government forms or whatever) that they’re willing to instead support a party that’s actively pushing us into authoritarianism.
Like sure some inclusive language is silly, but it’s a lot better than losing our national parks, destroying our social safety nets, celebrating cruelty to immigrants, and ripping the constitution to shreds in the process.
My feeling is that people aren't much against something inconsequential per se, instead they are against something that's out of their status quo and that question some underlying values they haven't ever questioned themselves (for example: genders).
Instead of being curious why exactly some people are proposing something that challenges their worldview they instead immediately allow their fear to take over, and reject the change.
It's the same pattern that non-accepting parents of gay children tend to go through when their kid comes out of the closet; in that case a lot of them have a change of heart into acceptance because they love the person, over time they are able to overcome the fear and understand a new worldview.
Not so much for the masses with flames being fanned by politicians wanting to capitalise on that fear, they are kept in fear, they are told to reject any attempt to educate them, the messaging calls it "evil" or "not from God" or "only for betas", adapted to the audience's most chauvinistic identity (religion, machoism, etc.).
Since it's easy to manipulate those into hating whatever is the bad-word-du-jour then those same politicians can attach any policy with "combating bad-word-du-jour" and a lot of the believers won't question it much.
It's disheartening because even though I'm quite progressive and leftist (in the European sense), I still believe that conservatism is necessary to balance out the discussion, unfortunately it's also an ideology intrinsically bound to the fear of change, a feeling very easy to be co-opted by power-hungry people.
It's an ideology that rejects rationality and almost completely embraces emotion (fear), which is rather ironic since its most fervent followers want to believe they are the most reasonable and logical ones.
Whether a birth certificate for a same-sex couple in the IVF case mentions "mother" or the less ambiguous "inseminated person" is indeed fully inconsequential for the vast majority of the American public.
Changes in official government paperwork to be more inclusive are very much not "control of language and attempts to assert control over its use and definitions".
I mean, you could describe the Trump administration's executive order requiring government agencies to stop using Gulf of Mexico and instead use Gulf of America as simply "changes in government paperwork." But I think it's obviously also an attempt to change the language.
I wouldn't classify it as "changes in government paperwork" since the EO defined the official name for a geographical feature, very different from some law changing the usage of a term in a government's form. Quite a different level and degree, if that's out of consideration everything can be reduced to some more general form to be played as equivalent.
I also DGAF about the renaming of the gulf of mexico relative to essentially any of the other, much more consequential actions the administration is taking.
> the recent proposal to change the word "mother" to "inseminated person" in Wisconsin state law
Life gets easier once one realizes that talking points like this are at best missing all important context, if not outright deceptive. Other examples would be the "They spent $X studying OUTRAGEOUS_THING"
The exhausting thing is doing to required research to point out to people that the outrage pornography sound bite they're screaming about is, of course, completely fake and designed to enrage them.
Then they thank you for the information and go on to completely believe the next one with no pattern recognition whatsoever.
