Groups on the right are irate with the Associated Press for caving in to gay pressure and changing its influential Stylebook so that its writers will now refer to same-sex couples as “husband and husband” or as “wife and wife.” But the change really shows that “objectivity” as conventionally defined does not exist.
The problem has been clear for years regarding abortion. Newspapers until the 1960s referred to creatures in women’s wombs as “babies” or “unborn children.” Then they switched to “fetus,” technically correct but linguistically distancing—and inconsistent, since they didn’t go Latin by calling the mom a “gravida” or having their crime reporters write about the “corpus mortuum.”
Now, language used—“fetus” vs. “unborn child”—quickly types a person as favoring or opposing abortion. New Orleans residents refer to their boulevard median strips as “neutral ground,” but we lack neutral...