Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [115]
During Bush’s first campaign for governor of Texas, he told an Austin reporter that only people who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior could go to heaven. While most of the press felt it was a gaffe, Rove knew it was the best thing his candidate had said so far. It let the people who like to exclude others from heaven know that he was one of them. That’s why, in 2000, they kicked off South Carolina at Bob Jones University.
Rove likes to point out that four million Christian conservatives who voted in 1994 failed to vote in 2000. In a close political campaign, four million votes can mean the difference between winning and losing. That’s why one of Bush’s first acts as president was to cut off money for international family planning organizations that even mention abortions. And that’s why Bush imposed restrictions on funding stem cell research, impeding the search for cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and Lou Gehrig’s disease, and in the process misleading everyone on how many viable stem cell lines existed. He said there were over sixty; there are fewer than ten.
It is why he is pushing abstinence-only sex education, which does more to prevent condom use than to prevent sex. It’s why he appointed Dr. David Hager, an obstetrician/gynecologist who opposes prescribing contraceptives to single women, to chair the Food and Drug Administration’s panel on women’s health policy. And it is why Bush continues to feed us his born-again story. Which I’m sure has some truth to it. But, Jesus, do you have to wear it on your sleeve?
And do we have to hear all this stuff about reading the Bible? Remember that conversation I had with Don Evans at the White House Correspondents Dinner where it became clear that he (and perhaps, by extension, Bush) had absorbed amazingly little from his Bible study boot camp? That story eerily parallels an excerpt from a January 2000 interview Bush did with Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek.
At the time, the campaign had been making a big deal about Bush reading the Bible every day. So Fineman asked, “What Bible passage did you read this morning?”
At this point, according to Alter, Bush started “getting really peeved.”
“You know something,” Bush said, “I think you’re trying to catch me as to whether or not I can remember where I was in the Bible . . . it’s like that question when I was asked about tell me about Dean Acheson . . . I was asked that question because most of the press corps didn’t think I read that book.”2
Has Bush read the Bible? I’m sure he has. But from the little I know about the New Testament, Christ had a special place in his heart for the meek and the downtrodden. For the most publicly religious administration in memory, to me, anyway, this one seems the least Christian.
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Abstinence Heroes
President Bush has pushed to fund abstinence-only sex education, saying that it is the only “surefire” way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and immoral, nasty, hot teen sex.
Abstinence, of course, does prevent all of these terrible things. Abstinence education, however, does not.
On a November 1999 Meet the Press, candidate Bush told Tim Russert, “The folks that are saying condom distribution is the best way to reduce teenage pregnancies obviously haven’t looked at the statistics.”
Interesting. Maybe he’s referring to the statistics finding a huge decline in teenage pregnancy between 1990 and 1996. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute attributed 75 percent of that decline to increased use of contraception—the most frequently used being condoms. It’s one of many studies that the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the American