When I was a high school English teacher, I used to begin every class with a quotation, either from the text the students were reading or something relating to the subject matter of the day's lesson. The students were to come in, take their seats, take out their notebooks, and spend a few minutes writing a response to the quotation. The quote was meant to get them thinking about something that would be important to the lesson or discussion of the text that day; the assignment was, simply, read the quotation, and write down your thoughts.
Over the years I found that I needed to take a few days at the start of the term to teach them how to do this, and more to the point, how not to do this. See, fairly often the students would read the quotation -- which was almost always a single, brief sentence -- and say, "I don't understand the quote," or "I don't know what it means." My standard response to this was always, "Ask a question." If they asked, "What does the quote mean?" I'd respond, "Ask a better question." I made it clear that I would answer their questions but would not do their thinking for them.
What was usually going on was that the students were laboring under the misapprehension that they were being asked to figure out and report what the quote "means," not for their response to it. They were searching for an "answer," which they hadn't yet been given, to a question that hadn't been asked. They were, essentially, trying to translate English into English.
I tried to teach them, and I have always maintained, that it is impossible to read a sentence written in your own native language and have absolutely no "understanding" whatsoever of what it "means." I'm sorry, but that simply cannot happen, even if you are only semi-literate. The problem, among many, was that the students were confusing "understanding" with translation. They thought they were being asked what the quote "means," in the same sense that they would be asked what a sentence written in a foreign language "means" in English. Translating English into English, in this context, is a useless endeavour. That's why I stopped teaching Shakespeare, and why a lot of English teachers still do it wrong; because the kids are so intimidated by the language that the entire study becomes a tedious and pointless exercise in translating English into English.
I've written about this at length in the past, and I don't want to belabor the point here, even though it's an interesting topic by itself. I bring this up because I'm finding that what currently passes for political debate and discussion reflects a staggering apparent inability to translate English into English accurately or correctly. I've written about this in the past too; "Believing Unreasonable Things" is a diary about how a friend of a friend translated "shifting some of the health-care costs for veterans from the V.A. to private insurance" into "forcing wounded veterans to pay for their war injuries." Reams have been written about how "end-of-life counseling" was translated into "death panels," how "You didn't build the public infrastructure" became "You didn't build your business," and how "control and regulation of firearms" is translated into "confiscation and disarmament." "Separation of church and state" now translates into "persecution of Christians." I've been reading lately about how a few discrete efforts to accommodate transgendered students translate into a full-blown national social phenomenon and effort to "enforce gender neutrality," whatever the hell that means.
We see this in political ads, blogs, comment threads, we hear it on the radio, on TV, in conversation, everywhere. Some politician or pundit says [X], we hear [Y], we rush to the internet to be outraged over [Z]. And more than that, we try very hard to do this. President Obama says, "I like dogs." Fox News puts up a chyron saying (or "asking"), "OBAMA HATES CATS?" A viewer takes to the Internet to shriek, "Obama wants to kill my cat!" WorldNetDaily reports, "Obama: All Cats to Be Impounded and Destroyed." And so forth.
And make no mistake: this is one area wherein "both sides" actually are "just as bad." "Liberals" (i.e., the Democratic Party's color-war team) sometimes have just as much trouble translating English into English as "conservatives" (the GOP's color-war team) do. Case in point: Marriage equality, and discrimination more generally. I've often bent over backwards to explain what discrimination is, and what it isn't, how anti-discrimination laws work, why we have them, why certain classes are protected, and so forth. Yet nary a conversation goes by when I'm not accused of victimizing someone or of saying that they should be victimized, that people should be "allowed" to victimize them, or that victimizing them "should be legal" or "is OK." That applies both to "conservatives" defending the perpetrators of discrimination, and to "liberals" defending its victims.
Example and discussion below the fold.
I'm really disturbed by this story coming out of Idaho about an old couple that runs a small private "wedding chapel" that only does religious wedding ceremonies for opposite-sex couples. It's not a church, it's a for-profit business (a "religious corporation"), so they're subject to state and local anti-discrimination laws. The local anti-discrimination ordinance at issue in this case, I understand, assuming it's being reported correctly, is criminal in nature and could result in fines or jail time for these people. Naturally, "conservatives" are in a full-blown conniption-freakout over this; you can probably guess what they have to say.
My initial reaction was to not be entirely comfortable with the idea of sending these people to jail for this. Now, I can already feel some "liberal" hackles going up, outrage brewing, and people skipping straight to the comment section from here without reading the rest of the piece, to start freaking out about how I think it's OK to discriminate against gay people and how I fail/refuse to recognize that these people are just nasty bigots doing a horrible and unforgivable thing. So far, I've only said that I'm not comfortable with the idea of throwing an elderly couple in jail for running a straights-only wedding chapel. Some of you have already translated this into something else, which will color your reading of the rest of the piece. I've already taken the wrong side, so whatever else I have to say has to be wrong.
Back to the story: The man and his wife appear to be ordained ministers, not justices of the peace, county clerks or notaries public. They don't issue marriage licenses; they only perform ceremonies, and the ordinance applies to commercial businesses, not governmental agents. I was thinking at first that what these people are doing might not be illegal -- if they can successfully argue that the sole "product" or "service" they offer is "opposite-sex-marriage ceremonies," as opposed to "marriage ceremonies" that they in turn offer only to opposite-sex couples. It's a fine distinction, but it might have legal significance. The theoretical basis for laws against commercial discrimination is that a retail merchant has to make the same offer on the same terms to everyone. Here, they might be able to avoid liability by making this about what they are offering, not who they're offering it to. Even if not, even if that's a weak argument, even if these amount to the same thing, I think the owners would have a better chance of avoiding liability by arguing that than if they tried to use their "religious beliefs" as an excuse, which they almost certainly can't.
Of course, some of you will translate the previous paragraph to say, "The bigots should win because discrimination is legal," and/or "I think what they're doing is OK." You're already thinking of counter-examples that "prove" me "wrong," even though I haven't actually said anything that lends itself to disproof.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the real source of my discomfort with punishing these people so harshly was the fact that the ordinance at issue here is criminal rather than civil. Anti-discrimination laws are almost always civil in nature; they create a cause of action for a lawsuit, create legal presumptions and shift the burden of proof, they don't subject "offenders" to fines and jail time. This is actually the first criminal anti-discrimination law I've ever encountered. Discrimination in the employment and commercial context is obviously wrong, but it should never be a crime. Employers and merchants who discriminate should be sued, and compensate the victims for the damages they cause, but not arrested, prosecuted and thrown in jail.
Again, some of you will translate the previous paragraph to say, "Discrimination should be legal," or "should not be illegal," or "Employers and merchants should be allowed to discriminate," or "should not be punished for discriminating," or again, "I think what they're doing is OK." To be fair, a lot of people don't understand the difference between civil and criminal liability (and there's no reason to expect them to), and use terms like "illegal," "unlawful," "against the law," "criminal" "wrongful," "impermissible," "liable" and "guilty" interchangeably, when they're not. (Also, "bigotry," "prejudice," "ignorance," "racism," "discrimination" and "hate" are sometimes used interchangeably, and wrongly.) But try to explain to a "liberal" how it's not really accurate to say that a person can't discriminate, and more accurate to say that he could be successfully sued if he does, and suddenly you're an enabler, proponent and perpetrator of discrimination and an enemy of anyone who might be discriminated against.
It seems, then, that any thought about this case or this issue that doesn't amount to -- or, more to the point of this diary, doesn't translate to -- "Those people are just bigots! Evil! Religious nuts! Throw the book at them! Punish them! Fine them! Throw them in jail!" translates to "I'm a bigot, I like bigots, I think bigotry is OK, I want bigots to be able to hurt gay people, I hate gay people, and I hate you."
Well, no.
"You said they have a right to be bigots!" Well, no.
"You said they should be allowed to discriminate!" Well, no.
"You said discrimination should be legal!" Well, no.
"You're wrong! You're full of crap! F*** you!"
I wish I was exaggerating on that last one. There are times when I begin to understand why "conservatives" think "liberals" are "intolerant." (That last sentence, by the way, does not translate into me saying that "liberals are intolerant.") I spent years in the early-mid 2000's being accused by my "conservative" friends of, essentially, not hating or insufficiently hating the people, groups and entities that I was supposed to hate. "Liberals" sometimes do the same thing. I think this is an example. I wasn't willing in this case to leap to the conclusion that the chapel owners are just bad people doing bad things, treat them only as nasty, bigoted, mean-spirited religious fanatics, and color my own thoughts and analysis with that treatment. I didn't hate them and/or distrust them enough to satisfy some "liberal" readers.
But that's really not my point. My point is that, whether inadvertent or deliberate, our apparent inability to correctly and accurately translate English into English, and our concomitant tendency to do so in a way that has us constantly accusing each other of saying things we didn't actually say, and then in turn making personal character judgments based on our having said what we didn't say, is no way to have a meaningful conversation about anything important, let alone understand it. We all want to feel a certain way about things and we get defensive when we hear or read things that don't seem at first blush to validate those feelings. As I've said time and time again, a person can either try to understand something, or try to validate his/her feelings about it. One probably can't do both.
And there's another side to this too. I try to remain aware of the possibility that if people are translating my English into different English, if they're paraphrasing me in ways that don't indicate what I said or what I meant, the problem might be me. They could be misreading me, but I could also be misstating what I mean. What I always taught my students was that as a reader, it's your job to understand the text, and it's not the text's job to be understood by you; however, as a writer, it's your job to be understood, to (with apologies to Paul McCartney) indicate precisely what you mean to say. It was part of my overall classroom credo: "It IS your fault." Maybe it is my fault that "Running a straight-religious-wedding chapel might not be a crime" is being translated into "I love bigots and am totally cool with discrimination."
I had a supervisor once in school who objected to my insistence that students write and use the English language with precision, to say precisely what they mean. "Well," she said, "if you can pretty much understand what they're trying to say, that's good enough." No, I said, that is not good enough. That's how misunderstandings happen. We need to be able to accurately translate our own thoughts into English, not just others'.
In my classroom, translating English into English was considered a pointless exercise, something to be avoided, or at the very least not relied upon exclusively, when studying literature and learning to write. In the forum of politics, law and policy, it's something else entirely, something we should probably be more conscious of. It gets tedious after a while to have to keep typing the phrase, "I neither said nor implied any such thing."
