“Fake But Accurate” Christians

Journalists love to print stories laden with irony–at least when it comes to Republicans. Just weeks before the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush was being blasted over his pro-life stance. Nothing new there, except this time the critic was a highly respected fellow evangelical.

In an article for the liberal-leaning Christian magazine Sojourners, Glen Harold Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, blamed the president’s social and economic policies for an increase of 52,000 abortions in 2002 than would otherwise have been expected nationwide.

“I am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis,” Stassen wrote. “I am consistently pro-life. … I look at fruits of political policies more than words. I analyzed the data on abortion during the George W. Bush presidency. My findings are counterintuitive and disturbing.”

Stassen used data in 16 states to make his case that while abortion had decreased by 17.4 percent during the 1990s, abortions started increasing when Bush took office in 2001. Stassen said falling incomes, rising unemployment, and a lack of health insurance under Bush’s watch were factors.

While some pro-life groups, such as the National Right to Life Committee, quickly raised questions about the data and Stassen’s conclusions, the message had been delivered, predictably amplified by the mainstream media. Bush, seeking to solidify his standing with pro-life voters, had little opportunity to refute it but still won a high percentage of religious voters, carrying him to victory.

But in the wake of the November election, Democrats from Howard Dean to Hillary Clinton have used Stassen’s argument to tell values voters that they represent the real pro-life party. Dean, never prone to understatement, even told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that “abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was president.”

There’s just one problem. Stassen’s conclusions are bunk.

That’s the assessment not of Karl Rove but of the abortion-rights-supporting Alan Guttmacher Institute. The institute, known as the authority in abortion statistics, looked at data not from 16 states, but from 43. It found that in those states the number of abortions had actually decreased by 0.8 percent in both 2001 and 2002, continuing a 20-year trend.

It’s also the conclusion of the Annenberg Center’s respected FactCheck.org website. In a May 25 article entitled “The Biography of a Bad Statistic,” the center called Stassen’s sweeping claim “false,” “untrue,” and “[not] justified by the sketchy information he cited.”

And did this self-described “Christian ethicist … trained in statistical analysis” apologize for using incomplete and erroneous data right before the vote? Sadly, no. The most Stassen, son of the late nine-time losing presidential candidate, Harold Stassen, would concede is that the new Guttmacher statistics are “significantly better” than those he used.

Far from being chastened, Stassen called the decreases in abortion under Bush–which after all occurred during a recession inherited from the Clinton administration, worsened by 9/11–a “stall” in the progress made during the 1990s. Even Sojourners declined to apologize to a fellow Christian, saying, “[F]or those pursuing a consistent pro-life ethic, these updated statististics still paint a troubling picture.”

In other words, much like the ludicrous CBS News defense of its forged-documents story, the charge by these “consistently pro-life” Christians is “fake but accurate.”

How ironic.

Author Insight: Hugh Hewitt on the Blogosphere

Hugh Hewitt, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and author of the 2004 book If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends On It, is an expert on the blogosphere. Hewitt spoke with Stan Guthrie about his book new book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World.

What are your credentials to write about this topic?

I have been running my own blog, HughHewitt.com, since 2001, and I have been a print and broadcast journalist for more than 15 years.

You liken the advent of the blogosphere to the Reformation, when the Catholic Church—like the traditional media today—lost its monopoly on information. Is it really as serious as all that?

"Serious" isn't a word I would use, but "significant”? Yes. The blogosphere's arrival isn't about religion or dogma or faith, but about the toppling of a communications hierarchy just as dominant in its field in the 20th century as Rome was with regards to faith in Europe in the 16th.

Give me some numbers about the explosion of blogging. How many are there, how fast are they growing, and how many people read them?

My book Blog is a history of the blogosphere, combined with an analysis of why it grew so quickly—from two dozen blogs in 1999 to more than 10 million today—as well as some chapters devoted to the future of the blogosphere.

The best scorecard on the number of blogs and their visitorship can be found at the blog of N.Z. Bear. Technorati.com also keeps count of the number of blogs. The Pew Center has recently released some valuable data on blog readership, and I think your readers will want to absorb the entire report.

In the book, you describe how various "blog swarms" helped bring down powerful people such as Trent Lott and Dan Rather. And yet you also seem to say that despite the catastrophic potential of bloggers to wreak similar havoc elsewhere, few organizations are prepared. Why?

Most businesses are run by competent people with little time to stay on top of changes in communication technology. Thus, when those changes arrive at their doors, they are surprised. Recently Pepsico's president gave a controversial speech at a commencement and the blogosphere took it from zero to 60 M.P.H. in a couple of days. Pepsico is now very well informed about the blogosphere.

What are the penalties for ignoring the blogs?

Primarily bad branding, as with the Pepsico affair, but there are lost opportunity costs as well, when firms involved with marketing lose the chance to communicate with a new generation of opinion makers and influencers.

What industries are particularly at risk?

Media corporations have been hit the hardest, and they will remain the most vulnerable to criticism from bloggers, but every consumer products company needs to be alert, and of course anyone that buys advertising has to recognize that the reach of their print ads is declining as eyes turn from old media to new media, which includes the blogs.

How should organizations prepare?

I discuss this at length in the book, but the key is to identify the best bloggers in the organization and get them to work. Hire them if they aren't already there.

You also encourage readers to start their own blogs. What kinds of blogs are needed? And given the numbers you cited earlier, don't we have enough already?

We are nowhere near saturation when a nation of 300 million people only has 10 million blogs. First, there's a huge amount of talent in this, the most literate society in history. Second, everyone who talks on a regular basis to a circle of friends can deepen and extend that communication via a blog.

What do people need to know to create a first-rate blog and get people to read it?

Read the big ones for a few weeks before beginning, in order to see the patterns that have brought audience and influence.

Which are the best blogs out there?

The big two in my book are Instapundit and Power Line, and those they link to on a regular basis. There's a more comprehensive list in the book.

What's next for the world of blogging?

Aggregate blogs, where a larger number of very good bloggers combine to up the content without diminishing the quality of the posts. I expect to be named the executive editor of one such aggregate blog soon if I can work out the details, but will keep on at HughHewitt.com at the same time. The aggregates will draw lots of traffic and enhance the influence of the individual bloggers even as they create virtual newspapers.

One final note for your readers: I wouldn't own a single newspaper stock if my outlook was longer than five years. Their circulation is being hollowed out, and it is only a matter of time until their advertisers figure this out. The future of print publishing is in magazines, not behind-the-news-cycle papers.

An average reader 10 years ago read X percent of the paper—seeing X percent of the ads as a result, while today that same average reader is reading X percent minus Y percent of the paper, and a similarly smaller number of the ads. Time spent with the paper is crashing, and some folks, like me, who still take the paper don't touch it, getting all our info online. This is what I mean by hollowed out. The advertisers aren't paying a cheaper rate, but they are getting much less for their money.

Ethics in Limbo

Fifty Republicans in the House last month defied their president’s veto threat to pass a bill (H.R. 810) that would lift current funding restrictions on destroying human embryos. Lawmakers want researchers to gain access to a scientific treasure trove of more than 400,000 frozen embryos created by in-vitro fertilization and currently in cold storage at fertility clinics around the country.

One Republican renegade is self-described pro-lifer Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., whose mother-in-law had died the night before of Alzheimer's. "I must follow my heart on this and cast a vote in favor," Emerson said.

When it comes to turning human flesh into raw material for medical experimentation, more and more people are willing to follow their hearts. After the president announced his compromise position on funding research to then-existing embryonic stem-cell lines, in 2002 the American people narrowly supported such research by 43 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew Forum. Today, the margin has swelled to 56 percent in favor to 32 percent opposed.

Apparently the relentless appeals to people’s emotions by scientists eager to find hypothetical but unproven cures (and abundant research dollars) are working. But despite all the hype, it’s a fact that embryonic stem cells have treated no diseases.

Compare this hype to real scientific progress via stem cells taken from umbilical cords, which do not involve the destruction of developing human life. To date, stem cells taken from cord blood have treated 57 different diseases.

But more and more people don’t want to be saddled with ethical limits or confused with inconvenient scientific facts. In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times glossed over these facts by saying, “It’s not a choice between a human life and an embryo’s life. It’s a choice between real human lives and a symbolic statement about the value of an embryo.”

Pro-experimentation advocates are willing to help the human being they can see (a mother-in-law, for example) by killing the human being they can't see (the embryo). Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tex., closed the debate on H.R. 810 by saying, "If given a choice, err on the side of opportunity."

Remember when (not so long ago) people used to talk about erring on the side of life?

There’s not much chance of that these days. Even President Bush’s 2001 compromise policy allows researchers to destroy human embryos for their stem cells. Once he made that decision–in a well-meaning but muddled attempt to protect taxpayers from having to pay, as in abortion, for a morally objectionable act–the question shifted from whether we should kill embryos to how many.

And with those 400,000 human embryos “going to waste” in cryogenic limbo, it was only a matter of time until the answer to the how many question became quite high indeed. As impossible as this sounds, we urgently need to revisit the whether question.

Despite the immeasurable joy and the thousands of children the technique has helped bring into the world, in-vitro fertilization is fraught with moral problems. Many of the embryos created in the proverbial “test tube” are destroyed once doctors discover abnormalities. Many of the embryos die on their own. Because of the prohibitive costs, physicians in this line of work also routinely counsel infertile couples to allow the creation of “extra” embryos–to be frozen, used later, or (if unneeded) discarded.

Unfortunately, sometimes pro-life Christians, desperate to have biological children, participate in in-vitro techniques, turning blind eyes to the ethical dilemmas. Others have sought to redeem the practice by encouraging the parents of frozen embryos to donate them to infertile couples for adoption.

In fact, in his May 24 remarks on bioethics, President Bush highlighted 21 children between the ages of three months and seven years who were formerly frozen embryos. “Rather than discard these embryos,” President Bush said, “or turn them over for research that destroys them, these families have chosen a life-affirming alternative.”

Such efforts by the Snowflakes Frozen Embryo Adoption Program, a Fullerton, California-based nonprofit agency, represent a small but nonetheless encouraging response to our society’s potentially fatal bout of emotional utilitarianism.

These programs are valuable not just for the human lives they save but for the images they provide in a shallow, media-saturated culture. If the American people will no longer respond to plain scientific facts and detailed ethical reasoning, then pro-lifers will have to change tactics and give them faces, stories, and sound bites.

In the shadow of those 400,000 souls on ice, the alternative is chilling.

Q&A: David Limbaugh on Faith and Politics (Part 2)

David Limbaugh, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of the 2003 book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, is a conservative commentator with a distinctly Christian worldview. Limbaugh, an attorney, is the brother of radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. This is the second in a two-part conversation. The first appeared on Monday.

Some in the mainstream media foresee the coming crackup of the conservative movement. They argue that there are basic rifts between social and economic or libertarian conservatives. What do you think?

I definitely think it’s possible to see some realignment among groups currently aligned under the broadly described conservative umbrella. Christian conservatives are rightly disappointed in economic conservatives or libertarians who express little concern over social issues. This is a fundamental difference. For now, our common interests seem to outweigh our differences, but to the extent that social issues become more important—and they definitely will in the years to come—I could see a schism between social and merely economic conservatives. Most social conservatives are already economic conservatives, but not all economic conservatives are social conservatives.

With the culture war intensifying, there could be a falling out among these groups. I find merely economic conservatives disenchanted with the strong social conservatives, and they may one day exit in droves. The question is: "Where will they go?" Will they quixotically go to an impotent third party, or will they gravitate toward economic and social liberals holding their noses on the economic issues? That’s hard to imagine, given their driving interest in the economy.

But there is an additional complicating factor. With the advent of the war on terror, we have a third issue: foreign policy/national security, which is as important as the other two. It seems that many libertarians and purely economic conservatives are more sympathetic to the antiwar Left. So will they join forces with the Left, or will there be a great fragmentation across the board? I have no crystal ball, but I do believe the tensions between the various factions on the right are growing.

But I get some comfort from the fact that I don’t think the purely social conservatives constitute a great percentage of conservatives. Granted, there are many conservatives out there who aren’t that gung ho about the social issues, but they don’t violently disagree with social conservatives. They are more likely to stay, even if we social conservatives get on their nerves from time to time. And even if there is an exodus of some degree, I foresee at some point an influx of conservative Democrats, particularly in the African American community. Politics is never boring.

How do you break down the key issues facing this country?

I see the three categories as economic, social, and foreign policy/national security. Almost all issues, from Social Security to taxes, to abortion, to judicial tyranny, to the war on terror, fit under these categories.

The November elections indicated the strong influence of evangelicals in getting George W. Bush re-elected and in opposing homosexual marriage—so much so that Democrats—who are seen as the party of the secular Left—are insisting that they have values, too. What's your take on all this?

As I have written in a number of columns, I believe that traditional values voters will not be fooled by mere rhetoric or semantics. Democrats do not walk the values walk, in terms of what they advocate—and there’s no way they can cure that short of transforming their ideology, which, of course, isn’t going to happen. The battles we’re seeing in this country have existed since time immemorial. The parties are driven by their respective worldviews, and while individuals will defect from both sides, both sides will remain strong and vibrant. And, as I mentioned earlier, the secular Left is determined, persistent, and relentless.

Christians and other social conservatives must remain vigilant and engaged, or we will lose ground in the culture war. Christians, above all, must learn not to be paralyzed into inaction by the intimidating forces of political correctness. They must realize that they, not the people who advocate godlessness and the murder of babies in the womb, hold the moral high ground. They must hold their heads high and engage in the political and cultural arenas. They must be unafraid to be stigmatized by the secular Left as "intolerant," especially when you consider that leftists wrote the book on intolerance, particularly toward Christians.

Many polls taken during the Terri Schiavo controversy seemed to show widespread support among Americans for pulling her feeding tube. Other observers say the initial polls were biased, and that later polls paint a different picture. Where do you think Americans are headed on issues such as this one?

I believe the polls were unquestionably biased. Had people been fully aware of all the suspicious facts surrounding the case and had they been fully informed about the issues, I dare say that a majority would have favored preventing removal of the feeding tube. However, the culture of death marches on in this country, and death is increasingly glamorized—a frighteningly pagan phenomenon. Liberals are gaining ground in portraying these issues as matters of liberty and privacy, and concerns for the sanctity of life are getting short shrift.

Again, I think America is headed in both directions as a reflection of the polarization that is growing between Christian and secular forces. I suppose America’s future as a free and culturally healthy society will largely be determined by the outcome of the war over social issues, mainly those involving the sanctity of life. We must honor human life created in God’s image to remain a free society. If we increasingly rationalize the devaluation and diminution of human life, we’ll be able to rationalize away any of our freedoms.

The future, in essence, depends on whether the culture ultimately tilts toward moral relativism or biblical absolutes. As to the latter, I’m not referring to a Christian theocracy or anything remotely resembling it. To the contrary, I’m referring to the composition of our culture. Will it be driven by timeless, changeless values or insidious relativism? If I knew the answer to that, I’d be better able to predict our future as a free people. But one thing I can predict with certainty: If Christians give up the fight, we can be assured of our societal destruction.

What's your biggest worry about America, and your biggest cause for hope?

My biggest worry is that we forfeit our unique American culture and our foundational values as a society. As I say, if that occurs wholesale, our national future is in grave jeopardy. My biggest cause for hope is that there is a growing awareness among Christians and other cultural conservatives of the stakes in this war. I see in the present generation of young adults human beings who appreciate the things that matter most. We must strive to set an example for tomorrow’s societal guardians, who give us great reason for hope.