Pro-Lifers Lying (But This is To Be Expected)

Two spiritual sequels here, one to the similarly titled Rush Limbaugh Gets it Wrong Again (But This is To Be Expected) and to the ancient The Source Flowchart, or Why the “Mainstream Media” Doesn’t Run That Story, because of its similar content.

I was considering running an article on how different outlets present the same story, but after checking out the god-awful World Net Daily in the hopes of going right-to-left in coverage (WND, LifeSiteNews, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, DailyKos, and Democratic Underground) I just had to comment on this.

Pro-lifers make stupid crap up all the time (Paul Hill Days comes to mind) and come to think of it, it surprises me little how they rag on the integrity of major media outlets, yet fail to do any similar fact-checking on sites that vehemently agree with their viewpoint 100% (for some lulz, go to Catholic Answers and call the unsourced and unreplicated articles out for this, and see how many times you do that until they ban you; my record is 4). This brings us to our viewpoint.

I must revise what I will be talking about in the following example. This is not blatant lying; rather, I would call this projecting or taking dumb implications. I cull reference from an 8 July article entitled “Ginsburg: ‘I thought Roe was to rid undesirables.” They manage to get source material from the text of an interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to appear in the New York Times on Sunday. Now, apart from the fact that the web design hasn’t seemed to escape 1996 yet (state of the art rotating 16-color GIFs, etc.) you’d be hard pressed to find “I thought Roe was to rid undesirables,” or an uncondensed, more grammatically robust variant, such as “I thought Roe v. Wade was to get rid of undesirables,” or anything that means the same thing. However, the closest thing we do manage to find is this. Ginsburg says, “I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

I don’t associate that with racism. I think the reason that World Net Daily sprinkled in undesirables is because that word strikes an emotional chord (again with pro-lifers using appeals to emotion as their base arguments) with racism. I think this follows in the same note that pro-lifers always bring race into an issue for no reason. It’s impossible to see a pro-lifer comment on a black politician or speaker’s pro-choice ideals without talking about black babies being killed (their words, not mine). But getting back to the main track, the word undesirable brings back images of the Holocaust, with Hitler’s talk of eliminating undesirables, as manifested in the Jews, the gypsies, the gays, etc. I see what you did there.

And besides, although it may not sound politically correct, there are populations that we don’t want too many of, or even to have at all. I know I am arguing in a roundabout manner, but what would you rather have? A single and/or young mother, below the poverty line in a poor community birthing a vagrant child that’s a harm to the community and a menace to society (or on another track, dying in a back-alley abortion) or to have her abort her unwanted pregnancy at the free clinic, leaving her time to better herself? (I don’t usually censor comments, but if pro-lifers come around and start appealing to emotion, I will delete the comments).

Moving on to another favorite of Catholic Answers. I’m scanning through LifeSiteNews, an independent org focused on abortion-related topics, although the topic in question will not be related to that. What I will be focusing on is the recent Holocaust Museum shooting in Washington D.C. As you may or may not know, the recent shooting was carried out by one James Von Brunn, 88 years old. The octogenarian you see shot and killed a guard before being shot and killed himself on 10 June. Let’s take a look at what we see in the article.

Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10th show that he does not fit the description of the “right wing” or “conservative Christian” extremist that has been portrayed in the liberal mainstream media since the shooting.

Strike one right there. Like I said in the equally-ancient Moral Relativism and Christianity, Christian talking points rely on buzzwords and acronyms (like  S-P, AC, and PBA; cookies if you can decipher them). The Mainstream Media (or MSM) is one of those buzzwords, being seen as all major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC) specializing in news that isn’t Fox (which is supposedly the only fair network; fail).

What makes this so much fail is that while they are probably referring to the U/FOUO (Unclassified/For Official Use Only) document leaked from the Department of Homeland Security concering right-wing extremism, and Fox and all the other right-wing outlets decried this as an assault on conservatism itself, the DHS leaked another U/FOUO document at the same time talking about left-wing extremists! However, all the right-wing talking points spouters (Fox, WND, LifeSiteNews, and all the talk radio shows) seem to silently ignore this.

The point I am trying to make is that while the confines of racism usually stretch right, (although they can list lazily to the left) left-wing extremism usually manifests itself in the forms of environmentalism, animal rights, or socialism/communism (extra-special emphasis on that last one).

Continuing on….

In one of many online tirades, the shooter, 88 year-old James von Brunn wrote, “Christianity and the Holocaust are hoaxes. ‘Christianity’ destroyed Roman Civilization. The ‘Holocaust’ Religion is destroying Western Civilization.” Between them, he said, they destroyed the “Aryan gene pool.”

He wrote, “socialism represents the future of the West.”

Before he was stopped, von Brunn, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi, killed Stephen T. Johns, a 39 year-old security officer at the museum. Von Brunn was well known to federal authorities for his long history of violence and extreme anti-Semitic views.

Von Brunn entered the Holocaust Memorial Museum on Washington’s National Mall carrying a .22-caliber rifle and shot Johns at close range. He is in critical condition after being shot by two other security officers and is facing charges of murder and weapons violations. The FBI is also investigating possible civil-rights and hate-crimes charges.

Von Brunn wrote that he believed Christianity is a cult created by St. Paul and proliferated by Jews. Christianity’s set of “dangerous, imbecilic, concepts, tenets, and teachings, often treasonous, destroyed the Roman Empire and drenched the soil of Europe with Aryan blood for almost 2000 years!”

Left-leaning news media in the US have pounced on the shooting, blaming it on the proliferation of “hate” and “divisiveness” brought about by the political and religious conservatism of the Bush administration. Pundits were quick to link the Holocaust Museum shooting with the killing of late-term abortionist George Tiller, as evidence of the kind of “right wing extremism” identified as a threat to national security in a government report in April by the Department of Homeland Security.

Strike two. You see, political philosophy does not fall on a line, liberal to conservative, but a grid, not only liberal to conservative, but also libertarian to authoritarian. While I may admit that socialist ideals usually fall in liberal circles, socialism and communism are intrinsically authoritarian, falling in line with conservative and reactionary circles. For example, I know a guy who, while being a self-avowed communist, listens to Rush Limbaugh every day (something I find perplexing). Therefore, LifeSiteNews is wrong in saying that Von Brunn being a socialist automatically makes him a liberal.

In addition, God is not spelled GOP. That is all.

There’s not much else in the article, but if you want to see it, it’s right here. And with another day, another debunk. It comes to me as no surprise that pro-lifers and conservatives in general are stretching the truth, making key omissions, and plain out making stuff up just to further an agenda, with a double-standard standard fact checking by their constituents. Are you surprised?