Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: From today's Best of the Web Today:

"A familiar topic in this column is the press's use of Orwellian language to promote an attitude of moral relativism--Reuters' policy that "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" and the pervasive formulation "what opponents call 'partial-birth abortion' " are doubtless the best examples. But here's one that really caused our jaw to drop.

The New York Times the other day published a piece giving the encouraging news that African countries are moving away from a barbaric and horrific practice. Here's how the article, datelined Nairobi, Kenya, opened:

Isnino Shuriye still remembers the pride she felt years ago when she leaned over each of her three daughters, knife in hand, and sliced into their genitals.

Each time, as the blood started to flow, she quickly dropped the knife and picked up a needle and thread. Quickly, expertly, she sewed her daughters' vaginas almost shut.

"I was full of pride," she recalled recently. "I felt like I was doing the right thing in the eyes of God. I was preparing them for marriage by sealing their vaginas."

Now she feels like a butcher, a sinner, a mother who harmed her own flesh and blood, not to mention the thousands of other girls she says she circumcised in the last quarter-century as part of a traditional rite still common in Africa.

Scroll down a bit and you find this sentence: "She started as an apprentice while still an adolescent by holding down girls' legs for her mother to perform the rite, which opponents call genital mutilation." The reason opponents call it genital mutilation, of course, is because that's precisely what it is. Why does the New York Times, which supporters call a newspaper, feel obliged to distance itself from a clear, factual description?"