In George Orwell's eternal warning beacon, 1984, evil is distilled to its purest essence and writ large in the shape of a world turned into Hell: Inescapable, absolute, and pure malice encoded into the very fabric of thought and communication, poisoning and destroying humanity with every passing moment, every word, every thought, every decision, and every action - a bottomless downward spiral that Dante could only have dimly imagined. At the heart of the horror is a simple tactic: Redefining value-based words to mean their opposites. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength. It's hardly a news flash that conservatives, being authoritarian, have a penchant for redefining terms in this manner, so it's unsurprising that they would now (for the third time in a single decade) be trying to pervert the definition of the word "person" - a term at the root of all legal characterizations of rights under the law. Their contortions on this subject have been so Orwellian and deranged, that I thought I'd make some visual aids to keep track of what exactly these incredible heaps of hatred have defined as human or not at some point.
On the left are images of what conservatives define as a Person, and on the right are images of things they've denied are people, with a description below:
The reality is that even progressives have some growing to do on the definition of personhood. Some non-human species are intelligent enough to merit both the term and the protections it carries, at least on the level of legally incompetent humans. The funny thing is, even if you disagree with that opinion, you cannot deny that extending the definition down the scale of political power increases the overall strength of everyone it applies to: That has been the lesson of history. If the system is forced to protect the defenseless, then those who are not defenseless are even stronger when their rights are attacked.
Conservatives have gone in the exact opposite direction, and insisted on granting the definition to powerful, gargantuan, unconscious money-grubbing organizations that in no way resemble a person. The only reason they even care about zygotes and fetuses is that they're a convenient way to attack the rights of women - i.e., an attempt to assert the power of religious institutions over procreation. That just shows how cynical a Trojan horse the whole so-called "pro-life" movement is. Just watch: The moment the entire conception, gestation, and birth process can be automated, they'll suddenly forget all about the "precious babies" and treat fetuses the same way they treat animals in factory farms. It's about controlling a mode of production for them - about asserting what they view as their prerogative over life: The same mentality that causes them to not merely support, but love capital punishment - it's the exact same perverted power trip for them.
The absolute last thing conservatives would want is for society to take their "pro-life" rhetoric to heart, because if we did, we would enact actually pro-life policies effectively turning America Buddhist - rigorous social services; veganism enshrined in law; animals as legally incompetent entities with inherent rights rather than property protected from cruelty merely to placate sensibilities; a Defense Department that actually does its job rather than trying to create problems for itself to half-assedly address; abolition of capital punishment; the final end of the war on drugs; and so on, and so on. Anyway, I've ranted enough: This was supposed to be a cheeky diary, but then I got all indignant and started typing. I'll shut up now.