“[sigh] When will those mouth-breathing right-wingers give up their caves and clubs and learn to love science?” Pity the sophisticated liberal like CNN contributor Laura Sessions Stepp, whose impatience at Neanderthal misogynists and snake-handlers is palpable.
It’s also an act that helps them continue to push the falsehood that conservatives are anti-science and anti-contraception – and continue to play fast and loose with the facts in order to advance that narrative.
Stepp was the latest hack to rant that conservatives are anti-science yokels who hate women, comparing conservatives to “Flat Earthers” in an May 21 opinion piece titled “Anti-science and anti-contraception.”
Stepp claimed that because conservatives oppose the morning-after pill, they therefore oppose contraception. The definition of the morning-after pill as an abortifacient depends on whether conception begins at fertilization or implantation – and of course, the expert Stepp cited came down on the side of implantation.
Triumphantly, Stepp snidely remarked that “Not all political conservatives are Flat Earthers, of course. But there are proportionately more of them that there used to be.”
Of course, Stepp couldn’t be bothered to actually cite or quote an actual conservative. Instead, she cited pro-abortion blog RH Reality Check to describe what conservatives “in effect” believe, claiming that they believe “women could be pregnant before egg and sperm unite.”
Perhaps conservative commentators should turn to Live Action to describe what liberals “in effect” believe?
To prove her point that conservatives are idiots, she cited a study from Gordon Gauchat claiming that educated conservatives’ trust in science has reached an all-time low.
Hank Campbell, writing for Science 2.0, examined the real implications of Gauchat’s study: “Conservatives are not anti-science, they are anti-scientist. And only toward some scientists who seem to put politics ahead of reason.”
Accordingly, scientists caught deliberately skewing data in favor of global warming win the scorn of the right, and turn off the public to the cause of “science.”
Campbell also notes that the left also harbors a distrust of scientists in other areas.
If elite anti-science sentiment was all that counted the left would distrust science as much as the right.
Well, it turns out they do - but only the science they disagree with. So Union of Concerned Scientists will say to trust scientists when it comes to global warming but that scientists are out to kill us when it comes to food. What is the glaring difference? Climate scientists are primarily left-wing.
So the mountains of scientific evidence showing that the chemical BPA is safe are ignored or treated as irrelevant by the left.
But such nuances have no place in Stepp’s partisan ranting. She dialed up mythical war on women rhetoric: “Demonizing it [birth control] amounts to telling these women to throw out their briefcases and take up their vacuum cleaners. Conservative opposition to contraception has a last-gasp ring to it, and most Americans know it.
Again, Stepp displays a fundamental refusal to understand the basic point regarding contraception. Conservatives are not calling for a ban on contraception, as some liberals have claimed. What they are asking is that institutions affiliated with religious groups that believe contraception is morally wrong should not be forced to subsidize insurance companies, in order to pay for a product they consider to be immoral. Also, religious groups that self-insure would be forced to directly subsidize a product they consider to be immoral.
Besides, if 98 percent of religious women really use contraception, as the left claims (falsely), than why would any sane politician push for a ban on contraception? Opposition to contraception would be political suicide – not to mention there would be very few politicians in America, statistically speaking, who could support a ban on it.
For those that claim to worship at the altar of reason, Stepp and her fellow commentators display a reckless disregard for it. Ideology indeed trumps intellect – in the minds of lefty true believers like Stepp.
