Masters of the Big Lie

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 11/27/03)

Early in November I watched part of the 30-hour debate the Republican leadership of the Senate conducuted in hopes of unlocking the Senate’s ongoing filibuster of three pro-life Bush administration nominees for the federal judiciary. Throughout the debate advocates for the nominees spoke of the nominees’ sterling qualities while complaining about the Senate’s unprecedented techniques to thwart an up or down vote on the nominees. They maintained that since he assumed office in January of 2001, President Bush has had more nominations to the federal judiciary thwarted by partisan obstructionism than any other President in the history of the United States.

The liberal opposition, of course, presented a different view. They blocked the nominees for failure to comply with their concept of "mainstream" ideology, accusing them of being right wing ideologues. They also presented numbers relating to Bush nominations that differed significantly from Republican counterparts. While Republicans claimed that only 168 of 250 Bush nominees proposed for the federal bench survived liberal opposition, liberal Democrats claimed to have rejected only four. They even displayed in large white letters on a blue background the numbers 168 and four, claiming that they had acquiesced on 98 percent of the Bush administration’s judicial nominations.

In a television interview conducted during the debate, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle spoke with feigned sincerity of how cooperative Senate Democrats had been in the handling Bush nominees. He, too, echoed the 98 percent approval rating of Bush nominees.

While watching Daschle’s performance, I recalled off the top of my head at least six pro-life Bush judicial nominees who had run afoul of the Senate’s liberal contingent. It occurred to me that the filibustering liberals were repeating the faulty numbers for our benefit, since those inside the Senate chamber already knew the real numbers. They were doing what apologists for the abortion industry have always done: promoting a big lie, and counting on the media to report it as if it were fact.

Since the beginning of the abortion movement in the late ‘60s defenders of the indefensible have relied on lies to sell abortion. Were it not for Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of what was then called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), we could only assume that abortion advocates lied routinely. But Nathanson broke with the abortion movement in the mid-‘70s, and wrote his best-seller, Aborting America, a few years later. The book confirmed our worst suspicions. Abortion advocates lied as a matter of strategy.

Nathanson said that NARAL’s two key arguments employed to change the public mindset on abortion were outright lies. One pertained to the nature of the opposition to abortion on demand. Abortion advocates attempted to preclude debate on the issue by describing it as a Catholic "religious issue." According to Nathanson, "Our movement persistently tarred all opposition with the brush of the Roman Catholic Church or its hierarchy, stirring up anti-Catholic prejudices and pontificating about the necessity for separation of church and state."

Abortion advocates deliberately ignored opposition to abortion that emanates from a wide variety of philosophical and theological perspectives with roots that predate the birth of Christ, and targeted the Church for the bigotry. They’re still doing it.

In the early days of the abortion movement NARAL adopted the "coathanger" as the symbol of the self-induced abortion and the "back-alley butchers" who performed illegal abortions. They claimed that upwards of 10,000 American women died every year from illegal abortions. Nathanson told us that NARAL had no statistical basis for that number. Like their Senatorial advocates today who talk of approving 98 percent of Bush administration judicial nominees, they simply made that number up.

Concannon is a freelance writer from All Saints Parish in Manassas.

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