Quick, Somebody Buy Rep. Steve King a Dictionary

Socialism is a term some Republicans like to bandy about when they talk about Democrats. Beyond it being a really high scoring word in the game of Scrabble, it is filled with creepy and sinister innuendo. In their world, he who brandishes the “S” word casts doubt on the motives and the very patriotism of his opponents. Best of all, if the term sticks, the user can wrap himself in a verbal shroud of the freedom protector. Iowa Congressman Steve King is fond of the term and will casually toss it into a sentence with little regard to what the word means.

In an interview on conservative radioamerica.org, Rep. King asserted that gay marriage is part of the socialist agenda. (We will study the term “Agenda,” class, in our next lesson, because if you use this one right you can make it sound secretive and dark too.)

According to Mr. King, squashing individual rights and liberties begins by allowing same sex couples to marry. Mr. King says conservative darling and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) was right to say that legal same sex marriages would open the door to legal polygamy or bestiality. (I will give Mr. King and Mr. Santorum the Scrabble points for polygamy and bestiality, but because blogs are short I will have to leave the silliness of the slippery slope argument for later.)

"Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis," King goes on to say. Wait? What?

Mr. King pays no attention to the vexing paradox he creates when he says that by granting all Americans the equal freedom and right to marry whomever they choose, we also strip them of liberties at the same time. If Mr. King can say the best way to get government out of your life is to have government interfere with your marriage, it is easy to see how he can make the nonsensical declaration that the expansion of personal liberty allowing couples to marry would be a slide to socialism.

The truth is Mr. King and many others prefer to use socialism as a catch-all phrase for all things scary. They worry not that socialism, that intermediary step on the way to communism, is a political theory or system in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles. If they are able to paint the opposition as something ominous, they are able to depict themselves as the guardians of liberty. Socialist fits the bill as long as you don’t care what it means and are able to make it sound dirty.

If this was simply a game of word play, it would be one thing. But, Mr. King is playing with something much more dangerous, our personal liberties. We shouldn’t let him get away with it.

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.