Continuing our discussion from Sunday on the South Carolina Monument, today we’re talking about misnomers; when a word or a phrase is wrongly substituted for where a more accurate word or phrase should go. Think Orwell when you think misnomer and you can come up with a laundry list of conspiratorial misnomers used by our public officials. There are zillions of these but today we’re just going to look at three.

The first is the term “family values”. Usually this means anti-gay when used in a conversation with an idiot. “I am in favor of family values,” says the idiot about why he is against gay people getting married. Who can blame the idiot though; it’s more pleasant to say a bigoted thing with a positive spin on it.

One of the president’s favorites is to protect our “culture of life”. Maybe we could take this one seriously if he didn’t start the Iraq War. It doesn’t really mean anything – it’s the least provocative way to say you don’t like abortion. There was nothing wrong with the term “pro-life” except that too many people who were pro-life liked to see criminals and retarded people get the electric chair, so politicians had to find an even more docile way to say they were against killing unborn children but in favor of killing live adults, as long as they were bad eggs. Protecting a culture of life gives you a little wiggle room. You can protect life by killing so long as the person being killed, in turn, killed someone else.

In Gettysburg and throughout the South there is an emphasis by some white people to protect their “heritage”. This word is a silly one and very problematic. Gettysburg is considered, in fact, a “heritage site” so said the person at the beer distributor. I see the term on T-shirts adorned with the Confederate Flag and bearing the words “It’s Heritage Not Hate”. Heritage here means racism. They aren’t celebrating black heritage on that grubby T-shirt waiting in line for General Pickett’s Buffet to open – they’re celebrating Southern fried white heritage. That heritage comes with slavery, segregation, and a legacy of doing everything possible to marginalize African-Americans. “It’s ignorance not heritage” would be a more accurate shirt though if I wore it, I could get beaten up in town.

I am sure that the left has some good misnomers too but I don’t know their hypocrisy as well as my own. I am less familiar with the vernacular commonly used by democrats in the public sphere because I turn off the TV when someone like John Kerry or Barbara Boxer comes on - I don't like being talked down to. Of course, I am not saying that racism itself is a right wing issue, because it certainly isn’t, but only that a majority of the people wearing the Confederate Flag shirt, I bet, voted for the President. Then again, so did I.