Featured image: Rep. Ted Lieu (Source: Mashable)
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His administration’s holiday season “gifts” to the public include killing digital democracy, illegally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and the great GOP tax cut heist – stealing from ordinary people to benefit privileged ones, and now his latest move explained below.
Trump banned multiple Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) divisions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using the following words in their official documents:
vulnerable
entitlement
diversity
transgender
fetus
evidence-based (and)
science-based.
Are they the Trump administration’s political equivalent to the seven deadly sins?
The divisions were also told to use Obamacare, not ACA or the Affordable Care Act, and to use exchanges, not marketplaces in naming venues where consumers can buy health insurance.
The State Department is affected. It must now refer to sex education as sexual risk avoidance.
Shades of Orwell newspeak, changing language, limiting thought to the lowest level, so no one can question what they’re told, along with doublespeak, disguising language to conceal uncomfortable truths.
No explanation was given for the forbidden words, other federal agencies likely given instructions similar to HHS and State.
Unnamed federal officials said language restriction was unusual, a departure from previous years.
Public outrage followed. American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Rush Holt denounced the policy, saying:
“Among the words forbidden to be used in CDC budget documents are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘science-based.’ I suppose one must not think those things either. Here’s a word that’s still allowed: ridiculous.”
National Center for Transgender Equality executive director Mara Keisling blasted the move, saying:
“To pretend and insist that transgender people do not exist, and to allow this lie to infect public health research and prevention is irrational and very dangerous, and not just to transgender people.”
Rep. Ted Lieu called the move ‘MAKING AMERICA STUPID AGAIN…Are we now going to use Voodoo & leeches to treat diseases?”
NARAL communications director Kaylie Hanson Long said
“(f)orbidding scientists and researchers from using medically accurate terminology in order to push an extreme, ideological agenda is more dystopia than United States of America.”
“This latest move from the Trump administration amounts to yet another backdoor tactic to curtail Americans’ basic rights and freedoms, including the right to access abortion, and will put lives in real danger.”
Planned Parenthood public policy vice president Dana Singiser called the move “unimaginably dangerous.”
HHS staffers were informed directly about the language changes. State Department personnel got a guidance document, explaining how they must develop country operating plans under Trump’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief for 2018.
According to the Foundation for AIDS Research, federal funding for Abstinence/Be Faithful programs fell from $258.3 million in 2008 to $20.1 million this year – perhaps heading for elimination in 2018 to help pay for the great GOP tax cut heist.
An unnamed HHS official said
“(p)eople were surprised. (They) were not thrilled. We all kind of looked at each other and said: ‘Oh, God.’ “
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
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