Language fascinates me. This applies to the study of foreign languages and the pursuit of a proper, ideal form of one’s native language (such as the preservation of the Oxford comma to stave off chaos and confusion), but most importantly to how language is used for political and social issues — what words are chosen, what words are ethical (and in what contexts), how the definitions of words and concepts change over time, and so on.

These questions are important, because words matter. They can harm others, meaning they can be, at times, immoral to use. Individuals and groups using different definitions can impede meaningful conversation and knowledge or perspective sharing, to such a degree that, in cases where no definition is really any more moral than another, long arguments over them probably aren’t worth it.

Despite incessant right-wing whining about political correctness, the Left is doing an important service in changing our cultural language. It’s driven by thinking about and caring for other people, seeking equality and inclusion in all things, which could theoretically be embraced by anyone, even those on the other side of the political spectrum who don’t agree with this or that liberal policy, or even understand or know people who are different. “Immigrants” is more humanizing than “aliens” or “illegals,” “Latinx” does away with the patriarchal, unnecessary male demarcation of groups containing both men and women (and invites in non-binary persons), and “the trans men” or simply “the men” is far more respectful than “the trangenders,” in the same way that there are much better ways of saying “the blacks.” There are of course more awful ways of talking about others, virulent hate speech and slurs; more people agree these things are unacceptable. As far as these less insidious word choices go, replacement is, in my view, right and understandable. Why not? Kind people seek ways to show more kindness, despite tradition.

What I find curious is when the Left begins questioning the “existence” of certain concepts. Finding better phrasing or definitions is often important and noble, but for years I’ve found the claims that such-and-such “does not exist” to be somewhat strange.

Take, for instance, “The friendzone does not exist.” This is the title of articles on Buzzfeed, Thought Catalog, and so forth, which the reader should check out to fully appreciate the perspective (of those rather unlike this writer, an admittedly privileged and largely unaffected person). It’s easy to see why one would want to wipe friendzone off the face of the Earth, as it’s often uttered by petulant straight men whining and enraged over being turned down. The rage, as noted in the articles, is the mark of entitled men feeling they are owed something (attention, a date, sex), wanting to make women feel guilty, believing they are victims, and other aspects of toxic masculinity. Such attitudes and anger lead to everything from the most sickening diatribes to the rape and murder of women. It’s a big part of why the feminist movement is important today.

Yet friendzone is a term used by others as well — it’s surely mostly used by men, but it’s impossible to know for certain if it’s disproportionately used by men of the toxic sort. If you’ll pardon anecdotal evidence, we’ve probably all heard it used by harmless people with some frequency. We’d need some serious research to find out. In any case, many human beings will at some point have someone say to them: “I don’t feel that way about you, let’s just be friends.” A silly term at some point arose (perhaps in Friends, “The One With the Blackout,” 1994) to describe the experience of rejection. What does it mean, then, to say “The friendzone does not exist”? It’s basically to say an experience doesn’t exist. That experience can be handled very differently, from “OK, I understand” to homicide, but it’s a happenstance that most people go through, so some kind of word for it was probably inevitable. If it wasn’t friendzone it likely would have been something else, and one suspects that if we eradicate this particular term a new one might eventually pop up in its place (justfriended?). It’s all a bit like saying “Cloud Nine does not exist” or “Cuffing season does not exist.” Well, those are expressions that describe real-world experiences. As long as a human experience persists, so will the concept and some kind of label or idiom, often more than one.

The relevant question is if the use of the term friendzone encourages and perpetuates toxic masculinity. Is it contributing to male rage? Does one more term for rejection, alongside many others (shot down, for instance), have that power? Or is it a harmless expression, at times wielded by awful men like anyone else? That’s a difficult question to answer. (The only earnest way would be through scientific study, the basis of many left-wing views.) While I could be wrong, I lean towards the latter. I don’t suppose it’s any more harmful or unkind than shot down and so forth, and see such terms as inevitable, meaning what’s really important is changing the reactions to certain life events. My guess is the word is experiencing a bit of guilt by association — terrible men use it while expressing their childish sentiments about how they deserve this or that, about how women somehow hate nice guys, and so on, and thus the term takes on an ugly connotation to some people. Other terms are used by them less and don’t have that connotation. Readers will disagree on how strong the connotation is, and how harmful the term is, but the main point was simply to ponder how a word for a common experience should be said to “not exist” — it’s hard to discern whether such phrasing intrudes more on one’s knowledge of reality or English. Perhaps both equally. It’s rather different than saying, “This word is problematic, here’s a better one.” I could be misinterpreting all this, and every instance of denying existence is supposed to mean the word simply shouldn’t be used, leaving space for other, better ways to describe the concept, but that just goes back to interest in how language is used in social issues — why say one but not the other, more clear, option? Anyway, read the articles and you’ll likely agree the very existence of concepts are being questioned. Finally, it’s interesting to consider why the Left ended up saying X doesn’t exist rather than, say, X is real and your toxic ass had better get used to it. What if, like words of the past, it had been adopted by those it was used against to strip it of its power and turn the tables? What causes that to happen to some words but not others? Is it because this one describes an event, not a person? Another intriguing question about language.

Similarly, does virginity exist? Not according to some (The Odyssey, Her Campus). Again, the sentiment is understandable. Women’s worth has long been closely tied to virginity (read your bible), and with that came widespread oppressive efforts to keep women’s bodies under tight control, still manifested today in incessant shaming for engaging in sex as freely as men do, murder, and more. Men have experienced something related, though far less oppressive and in an opposite sense: women are more valuable as virgins (or with fewer overall partners) and are judged for being sexually active, while men are shamed or ridiculed for being virgins or not engaging in sex. Further, the definition of virginity is open to debate (the definition of friendzone is as well, though the most common one was used above). Is a straight person a virgin if he or she has only had anal sex? Is a gay person, who has regular sex with a partner, technically a virgin until death? Because the word’s meaning is subjective, and because it was a basis of patriarchal oppression, so the argument goes, “virginity doesn’t exist.”

Virginity is a way of saying one hasn’t had some form of sexual experience. For some it’s vaginal penetration, for others it’s different — the particular act doesn’t really matter. It’s simply “I haven’t had sex yet,” whatever form sex may take in the individual mind. Everyone has their own view of it, but that doesn’t make it unreal — in the same way everyone has their own idea of what love is, and yet love exists. Having sex for the first time is quite an event in any human being’s life, and most or many will experience it. Even if our history had been free of misogyny and patriarchy, there likely would have eventually arisen some term for having never experienced sex (or having been turned down). Does the statement “Virginity doesn’t exist” make sense? As with friendzone, it’s a labeled common experience, or lack thereof. While it was and is wielded by misogynistic oppressors, it’s an occurrence, and a concept, that certainly “exists.”

Does having a term for all this harm society and hurt others, helping preserve the hysteria over who’s had intercourse, and the associated maltreatment? Again, it’s possible. But my point is that a term is unavoidable. The state of being is real, thus the concept is real, thus a word or phrase will inevitably be employed. Being “single” happens — does “singleness” not exist? Won’t there always be some way to describe that state? We could get rid of the words virgin and virginity, but there’s no getting rid of “I’ve had sex” versus “I haven’t.” Another phrase or term will suffice just as well to describe the concept. We can abolish friendzone, but “The person I like turned me down” isn’t going away. There may be better words and definitions for concepts, but there’s often no case against a concept’s reality, which is how all this is framed. What’s important is to try to change the perceptions and attitudes toward these concepts, not deny they exist. “Yes, you were put in the friendzone, but you’ve done that to a lot of women you weren’t interested in. That’s life, you’ll live, grow up.” “So what if she’s not a virgin? Should your dateability or worth go down if you weren’t one? Why hers and not yours?” And so on. Indeed, it seems more difficult to change attitudes towards life events when you start off by saying, in essence, and confusingly, that an expression isn’t real.

There are other examples of assertions I find awkward, but as this article is lengthy already I will just briefly mention a couple of them and hope the reader assumes I’ve given them more thought than a few sentences would suggest. “There’s no such thing as race, it’s a social construct,” while doing a service by reminding us we are all part of the same human family, has always seemed mostly pointless in a reality where individuals biologically have different shades of skin and hair texture, and many are brutally victimized because of it. “No human being is illegal” puts forward an ideal, which I support: amnesty, a faster legal entrance policy, and so on (I also support the dissolution of all borders worldwide and the establishment of one human nation, but that may not be implied here). It’s also a call to describe people in a more respectful way, i.e. “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” Still, it always seemed a little off. Some human beings are here illegally, and our task is to change the law to make that history. That the State designates some human beings as illegal is the whole problem, the entire point. True, it’s an ideal, an inspirational call. But I always thought replacing “is” with “should be” or something would be more to the point. But enough splitting hairs.

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Donald Trump is a nightmare — an immoral, vile, ignorant human being.

It is impossible to fully document his awfulness with brevity. Even when summarizing the worst things Trump has said and done it is difficult to know where to stop.

He calls women “dogs” — they are “animals,” “big, fat pigs,” “ugly,” and “disgusting” if they cross him or don’t please his gaze. You have to “treat ’em like shit,” they’re “horsefaces.” He makes inappropriate sexual jokes and remarks about his own daughter, about “grabbing” women “by the pussy” and kissing them without “waiting,” and admits to barging into pageant dressing rooms full of teenage girls with “no clothes” on. He mocks people with disabilities, Asians with imperfect English, including, probably, “the Japs,” and prisoners of war. Trump was sued for not renting to blacks, took it upon himself to buy full-page ads in New York papers calling for the restoration of the death penalty so we could kill black teens who allegedly raped a white woman (they were later declared innocent), and was a leader of the ludicrous “birther” movement that sought to prove Obama was an African national. He is reluctant to criticize Klansmen and neo-Nazis, and retweets racist misinformation without apology. He’s fine with protesters being “roughed up,” nostalgic about the good old days when they’d be “carried out on a stretcher,” even saying about one: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” He likewise makes light of physical attacks on journalists. He praises dictators. He threatens to violate the Constitution as a political strategy. He cheats on his wife with porn stars and pays them to keep quiet. The constant bragging of a high I.Q. (his “very, very large brain“) and his big fortune, among other things, are emblematic of his ugly narcissism. His daily rate of lies and inaccuracies is surely historic, with journeys into fantasyland over crowd sizes and wiretaps by former presidents.

And those are merely the uncontroversial facts. Trump faces nearly two dozen accusations of sexual assault. He is alleged to at times say extremely racist things, remarks about “lazy,” thieving “niggers.” His ex-wife claimed in 1990 that he sometimes read Hitler’s speeches, and Vanity Fair reported Trump confirmed this. The payment to Stormy Daniels was likely a violation of campaign finance laws — Trump’s former attorney implicated him in court. Trump is being sued for using the presidency to earn income, his nonprofit foundation being sued for illegal use of funds. Trump has almost certainly engaged in tax fraud, joined in his staff and own son’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, and obstructed justice.

All this of course speaks more to his abysmal personality and character than his political beliefs or actions as executive. That’s it’s own conversation, and it’s an important one because some conservatives accept Trump is not a good person but think his policies are just wonderful.

On the one hand, many of Trump’s policies are as awful as he is, and will not be judged kindly by history. Launching idiotic trade wars where he slaps a nation with tariffs and is immediately slapped with tariffs in return, hurting U.S. workers. Stoking nativist fear and stereotypes about Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, driving the enactment of (1) a ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim nations (doing away with vetting entirely, keeping good people, many fleeing oppression, war, and starvation, out with the bad) and limits to refugees and immigrants in general, and (2) the attempted destruction of DACA (breaking a promise the nation made to youths brought here illegally) and a “zero tolerance” policy on illegal entry that sharply increased family separations. Saying foreigners at the border who throw rocks at the military should be shot. Pushing to ensure employers are allowed to fire people for being gay or trans (and refuse them service as customers), eliminating anti-discrimination protections for trans students in public schools, and attempting to bar trans persons from military service. Voting against a U.N. resolution condemning the execution of gays.

On the other hand, we can be grateful that, to quote American intellectual Noam Chomsky, “Trump’s only ideology is ‘me.'” Trump is thoroughly defined by self-absorption. He flip-flops frequently — reportedly most influenced by the last person he speaks to — and even used to call himself more of a Democrat, advocating for a few liberal social policies while remaining conservative on business matters. He either changed his mind over time or, as I wrote elsewhere, believed running as a Republican offered the best chance at victory and thus adopted an extreme right-wing persona — an idea that doesn’t at all mean he isn’t also an awful person (rather, it’s evidence of the fact). Outside of policies that serve him personally it is difficult to know what Trump believes in — or if he even cares. He may genuinely lack empathy and have no interest in policies that don’t affect him. True, perhaps he isn’t merely playing to his base and actually has a vision for the country, but the “ideology of me” does appear preeminent. While it’s “deeply authoritarian and very dangerous,” as Chomsky says, it “isn’t Hitler or Mussolini.” And for this we can count ourselves somewhat fortunate. (Likewise, that Trump isn’t the brightest bulb in the box, speaking at a fourth-grade level, reportedly not reading that well and possessing a short attention span, lacking political knowledge, and being labeled a childish idiot by his allies.)

Next time we may not be so lucky. As hard or painful as it is to imagine, someone worse will likely come along soon enough.

One day Trump will leave the White House, and with a profound sense of relief we will hear someone declare: “Our long national nightmare is over.” That’s what Gerald Ford said to the country the day he took over from Nixon — a man corrupt, deceitful, paranoid, wrathful, and in many ways wicked (he is on audiotape saying “Great. Oh, that’s so wonderful. That’s good” when told his aides hired goons to break protesters’ legs). One wonders how many people in 1974 thought that someone like Trump would be along in just eight presidencies? If there was a lack of imagination we shouldn’t repeat it.

In significant ways, there are already foreshadows of the next nightmare. Trump opened a door. His success was inspiration for America’s worst monsters. They have seen what’s possible — and will only be more encouraged if Trump is reelected or goes unpunished for wrongdoing and nastiness. I wrote before the election:

When neo-Nazi leaders start calling your chosen candidate “glorious leader,” an “ultimate savior” who will “Make American White Again” and represents “a real opportunity for people like white nationalists,” it may be time to rethink the Trump phenomenon. When former KKK leader David Duke says he supports Trump “100 percent” and that people who voted for Trump will “of course” also vote for Duke to help in “preserving this country and the heritage of this country,” it is probably time to be honest about the characteristics and fears of many of the people willing to vote for Trump. As Mother Jones documents, white nationalist author Kevin McDonald called Trump’s movement a “revolution to restore White America,” the anti-Semitic Occidental Observer said Trump is “saying what White Americans have been actually thinking for a very long time,” and white nationalist writer Jared Taylor said Trump is “talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites. That is something that is very important to me and to all racially conscious white people.” Rachel Pendergraft, a KKK organizer, said, “The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions. They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.” She said Trump’s campaign has increased party membership. Other endorsements from the most influential white supremacists are not difficult to find.

It wasn’t all talk. Extreme racists got to work.

• In 2016, David Duke of KKK fame, who was once elected to the Louisiana state house, came in seventh out of 24 candidates in a run-off election for U.S. Senate. He earned 3% of the vote; about 59,000 ballots were cast for him.
• In August 2018, Paul Nehlen, an openly “pro-White” candidate too racist for most social media platforms, garnered 11% of the vote in the GOP primary for Wisconsin’s 1st District (U.S. House of Representatives). He lost, but beat three other candidates.
• John Fitzgerald, a vicious anti-Semite who ran for U.S. House of Representatives, beat a Democratic and independent candidate in California District 11’s open primary, coming in second with 23% of the vote. 36,000 people chose him. On November 6 he lost with 28% of the vote (43,000 votes).
• A Nazi named Arthur Jones was the Republican nominee for U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’ 3rd District (though he was the only person who ran as a Republican candidate, becoming the nominee by default). He just got 26% of the vote — 56,000 supporters.
• Seth Grossman, who believes black people to be inferior, was the GOP nominee for U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey’s 2nd District. He beat three other rivals, with 39% of the vote. He just garnered 46% of the vote in the general election. That’s 110,000 voters, just 15,000 short of the victor.
• Russell Walker, who espouses the superiority of the white race, ran for District 48 in the North Carolina state house. He won the GOP primary in May, beating his rival with 65% of the vote. On November 6 he earned 37% of the vote in his race.
• Steve West spreads conspiracy theories about the Jews, even saying “Hitler was right” about their influence in Germany. He won nearly 50% of the vote in the GOP primary for Missouri state house District 15, beating three others. On November 6 he also received 37% of the vote against his Democratic opponent.
• Steve King has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2003. Hailing from Iowa’s 4th District, he said whites contributed more to civilization than people of color and constantly bemoans the threat that changing demographics represents to our culture. He also endorses white nationalists because they are “Pro Western Civilization” and spends time with groups founded and led by Nazis. He won 75% of the vote in the GOP primary — 28,000 votes. Then he got 50% in the general election (157,000 votes), keeping his seat.

There were others, of course, more subtle in their bigotry — more like Trump. Overall, there was a “record breaking” number of white supremacist candidates running for office this year. In most of the cases above, America couldn’t even keep such candidates in the single digits. Many beat more normal, tolerant candidates.

Those numbers may not seem all that impressive, not high enough to warrant any fears over a more horrific candidate winning the GOP presidential nomination. But it does not always take much. Turnout for the primaries is so low only 9% of Americans chose Trump and Hillary as party nominees. More voted for others, but that’s all it took. Trump won the nomination with 13 million votes, with 16 million Republican voters choosing someone else (both record numbers). He thus won 45% of the primary votes, which is about what Mitt Romney (52%) and John McCain (47%) accomplished. In other words, it would take less than half of Republican voters in the primaries to usher a more extreme racist (or sexist or criminal or what have you) to the Republican nomination. After seeing what many conservative voters could ignore or zealously embrace about Trump, this does not seem so impossible these days. Many Trump supporters, in a tidal wave of surveys and studies, were shown to have extremely bigoted and absurd views. From there, it isn’t that hard to envision a similar situation many conservatives faced in 2016, where they voted for an awful person they disliked to continue advancing conservative policies and principles. You have to stop abortion and the gays, you have to pack the Supreme Court, and so on. Some, to their immense credit, refused to do this — not voting, voting third party, or even voting for Clinton. But of course they were a minority. (And no, if you also believe absurd things, Democrats and liberals did not swing the election for Trump.)

The day of the election I felt more confident of Clinton’s victory than I had a couple weeks before. Previously, I had predicted that Trump was “probably” going to win. Perhaps it was a foolish optimism that washed over me on election day, when I expressed that Clinton would somehow eke out a narrow victory. I — and everyone else — should have known better. The tendency of the two parties to trade the White House every eight years, Clinton’s unpopularity on the Left, Trump as a reaction to the country’s first black president, the threat of the Electoral College handing the White House to another Republican with fewer votes…all sorts of factors should have made this an easy election to predict. Perhaps many of us simply did not want to face reality, did not want to believe we lived in a country where someone so awful could win, where so many voters are just like him or simply don’t care enough about his awfulness to refuse to vote for him. But after the shock and horror at Trump’s triumph abated, I could not shake the dread that this was merely the opening salvo in a battle against increasingly dangerous, extremist candidates.

Let’s hope, whether he — and it will certainly be a straight white male, given the extremist base — comes along in mere years or many decades, that we will not make the same mistake. Whether he will win is of course impossible to say. It will depend on how passionately we protest, how obsessively we organize, how voluminously we vote.

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There exists a particularly obnoxious set of visuals and memes produced by both conservative and less sophisticated liberal social media pages (looking at you, Occupy Democrats). They have to do with hypocrisy, and often revolve around abortion.

An example from the Left reads: “Only in America can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, anti-health care, and anti-food stamps and still call yourself ‘pro-life.'”

One from the Right goes: “Oh I get it now… The death penalty is bad, abortion is good.”

The implication or accusation of hypocrisy appears in conversation as well. Often when I post or write something critical of some horrible thing it’s only a matter of time before a conservative friend or acquaintance drops by with the tired “Yet you support abortion rights, what a hypocrite.” There is a good chance if you’re reading this right now it is because you just said something along those lines, as my quest to one day be able to reply in article form to any political comment or question, to save vast amounts of time, continues.

The problem with such accusations of hypocrisy is that they are so easily reversed. Well, well, well, you’re pro-life yet not a pacifist — what we’ve got here is a hypocrite! Why, you’re a pacifist yet somehow pro-choice — at least be morally consistent! 

Typically, when someone comes along guns blazing in this fashion, they’re employing the whataboutism fallacy. It’s distracting from or even discrediting whatever was originally posited by accusing someone of hypocrisy. So perhaps I post about how I think we shouldn’t conduct drone bombings in the Middle East and Africa because they kill far more innocent civilians than actual targets. When the inevitable “but abortion!” comes, there is usually no agreement concerning the immorality of the original issue addressed. Sometimes there is, but usually the individual only provides it later (when pressed), after the implied or explicit accusation of hypocrisy. The individual isn’t much interested in discussing whether the original issue is or isn’t moral. He or she wants to discuss abortion and make sure you know you’re two-faced. In turn, I try to keep things on-topic (and celebrate agreements where we find them), a debate preference that seems to annoy some people to no end. I often say that each issue, each moral question, needs to be weighed on its own merits. People don’t often grasp right away that this belief is connected to whether or not someone is actually a hypocrite, and I don’t explain it because that would further derail the conversation away from whatever the original topic was. As a remedy, I’ll briefly explain my thoughts here.

Say you’re a conservative and you’ve posted about how killing babies in the womb is wrong. Here I come with “But you support our War on Terror, which kills countless pregnant women and other innocent human beings. Hypocritical much?” If you’re like me, you’d be somewhat annoyed at this distraction from the cause you were trying to advocate for, or perhaps you’re unlike me and don’t mind taking whatever detour someone wants to go on. Regardless, you likely think and believe something along the lines of: These things are not the same. They’re a bit different, they have slightly different contexts — even if they both result in similar tragedies. You’re probably counting the ways in which they’re distinct or shouldn’t be compared right now.

In thinking so, you are essentially acknowledging that each moral question should be weighed on its own merits. Unless you actually think you’re a hypocrite, you believe these are slightly different situations and therefore different stances concerning them may be morally justified.

And you would of course be correct. These situations — torture, war, the death penalty, abortion, homicide, unregulated gun ownership, free market healthcare, and on and on — are unique, and have very different questions you have to answer before you can make a decision on whether they’re ethical. You have to work through unique factors.

Many of the most deeply conservative and fervently religious people believe abortion is never morally permissible under any circumstance, while others (conservatives and liberals, religious persons and nonreligious persons, etc.) believe there are some or many instances where it is. The purpose of this article isn’t to argue one way or the other, which I have done elsewhere. No matter what you think about abortion, I hope to simply demonstrate that people across the political spectrum are a tad too quick to use the h-word. So what are some standard questions about abortion that make folks think differently?

• Was the pregnancy the result of rape?
• Does birth endanger the life of the mother?
• Should the government force you to give birth against your will?
• Is it less moral to commit abortion as the pregnancy goes on? Does the age of the fetus matter?
• Does the fact that women seek unsafe black market abortions, resulting in health complications or death, in societies where abortion is illegal change the moral equation at all?

Those are important questions to think about and answer when deciding whether or when abortion is morally permissible, and each person will answer differently.

But the relevant question here is: Do we also need to ask those questions when we ponder the morality of war?

Not really. Those questions aren’t going to be very helpful when deciding whether massacring civilians while dropping bombs to kill terrorist suspects overseas is the right thing to do. The questions concerning war won’t sound like the questions concerning abortion, and vice versa. Each issue, each situation, has its own array of unique questions to consider. They’re truly dissimilar contexts. This is why accusations of hypocrisy like we saw above don’t make a lot of sense.

In fact, such accusations of hypocrisy are so easily reversed because they don’t really have much to do with hypocrisy at all. It’s a bit like saying it’s hypocritical to think killing someone in cold blood is wrong but killing someone in self-defense is not. It’s the same result, right? In either case someone is killed. You hypocrite! Well, no, these are different circumstances with different moral questions and answers. Real hypocrisy has more to do with situations that are essentially the same. If I curse like a sailor but lambaste others for cursing, that’s hypocrisy. If you think women should be forced to give birth regardless of circumstance but wouldn’t think the same for men if they could get pregnant, that’s hypocrisy. If you’re Mitch McConnell, that’s hypocrisy. And so on. It has to do with holding yourself to different standards than you hold others in the same situation, which is pretty disingenuous (the word actually derives from the Greek word ὑπόκρισις [hypókrisis], meaning play-acting or deceit). But in different situations you have unique things to figure out and may therefore end up with different moral answers. Even a close analog to abortion, infanticide (more universally opposed, yet not without exception, as with the infant in constant agony from an incurable illness), has a difference people have to mull over, namely that the baby has not yet been born. One can think both are wrong, that the difference is insignificant, but the fact remains it is a literal difference — the situations aren’t identical. They’re much closer than other comparisons, true, but there is a difference that is more significant to some than others. That’s my point. So you have to ask different questions and decide for yourself if different scenarios have the same moral conclusions; they may, but when they do not it isn’t necessarily hypocrisy, simply because the scenarios were not indistinguishable.

(This isn’t the only context in which “hypocrisy” isn’t really used correctly. I once thought of writing an article entitled No One Knows What Hypocrisy Means after I was called a hypocrite for frequently criticizing white attacks against innocent people of color but rarely — though not never — doing the same for the reverse. But one is an exponentially bigger societal problem than the other. I didn’t posit that one is the wrong thing to do and the other the right thing to do; it simply makes sense to focus most of our attention and energies on more prevalent problems.)

The conservative can say to the liberal, “You’re a hypocrite for being a pacifist yet pro-choice,” but why bother? The liberal can simply respond, “And you’re a hypocrite for being pro-life yet pro-war.” Stalemate. Are we all hypocrites then? I would posit, instead, that none of us are. I personally don’t believe a conservative who is pro-life yet pro-war is a hypocrite (if I did, we know what that would be an example of). This is because I know these issues are not the same, that the conservative has different reasoning for and answers to unique moral questions that could result in divergent conclusions between scenarios. I may not agree with that reasoning or those answers one iota, but I understand them and how they may not lead to the same place.

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