I’ve remarked before how language can be used to shape and direct our attitudes and feelings. Jim Burroway in Box Turtle Bulletin has a particularly interesting entry on how language is used by anti-gay groups in the US. Well worth reading and thinking about. As Burroway says:
For me, attending the Love Won Out ex-gay conference in Phoenix was very much like being an anthropologist from Mars, as Oliver Saks [sic] once put it. I observed a culture with its own vaguely familiar language and customs. And learning its language was key to understanding the framework and worldview from which Love Won Out operated. But as is true with many cultures, it almost requires a total immersion inside the culture of Love Won Out to pick up on the nuances of those terms and customs.
I tend to feel like that Sacksian anthropologist (actually ‘on’ Mars, rather than ‘from’ Mars, as Burroway writes) when I look at much of what emanates from the US, and doubtless the feeling is mutual. The contrast with things that are taken for granted here in The Netherlands is sometimes startling. Yesterday, for example, the Dutch "queen of the afternoon chat-shows", Catherine Keyl, had as her main guests Albert Verlinde and Onno Hoes, a same-sex couple who have been married for five years. Verlinde works in television and produces musicals, while Hoes is a politician; a member of the Executive for the province of Noord-Brabant. While the focus of the interview was on how do this couple juggle their busy professional careers to have enough time together, the underlying language and feeling of the interview was how "gewoon" (commonplace, ordinary) their situation was.
The interview served to point up that their experience was part of family life, whereas in Burroway’s example of the Love Won Out conference, the language used serves to drive a wedge between a person and their sexuality:
Their language is specially designed to treat people and their sexuality as if they were two completely separate entities, as if sexuality were a separate thing outside of the person. As Melissa Fryrear put it in a breakout session, they constantly work to “separate the ‘who’ from the ‘do’,” or, as others have put it more crudely in Mike Haley’s example, “the sinner” from “the sin”.
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