Leftist Lies
Article adapted from episode content.
Public discourse is frequently shaped by powerful narratives, sometimes propagated with assurances that later prove to be unfounded. A prominent example involves discussions surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). For over a decade, those raising concerns that the ACA could be used to fund abortions were often dismissed as employing scare tactics. However, recent developments confirm that such concerns were, in fact, well-founded. Several states, including Maryland and other jurisdictions often characterized as “blue states,” are now allocating funds from the Affordable Care Act to cover travel expenses for women seeking abortions. This practice directly contradicts repeated assurances that the ACA would never be used to finance abortion services.
Reports from various media outlets, including NPR, Politico, The Hill, The New York Times, and The Baltimore Sun, have confirmed that the Affordable Care Act is indeed contributing to abortion care costs. This demonstrates a critical need for skepticism regarding legislative assurances and highlights how foundational concerns about the use of public funds can materialize despite initial denials.
The Rhetoric of Compassion: A Potential Trojan Horse
A common argumentative tactic in public debate involves leveraging the concept of compassion as a tool to counter moral objections. Opponents of certain policies are frequently accused of being un-Christian, uncompassionate, or uncaring towards the poor if they raise ethical concerns about proposed behaviors or legislation. This “compassion angle” can serve as a Trojan horse, designed to conceal the true implications or provisions embedded within legislation.
Consider the argument often put forth regarding socialized medicine: “Why oppose something that helps poor people? European socialized medicine works well for the poor; why are you against it?”. Such claims frequently carry hidden and undefended premises. One such premise is the unproven assumption that government charity or handouts are equivalent to biblical charity, or that government entities can more effectively care for the poor than private charity or market economies. Another implicit claim suggests that genuine care for the disadvantaged is demonstrated only through support for large government programs.
It is crucial to differentiate between merely having “a heart for the poor” and possessing “a mind for the poor”. The latter implies a commitment to identifying and implementing solutions that genuinely alleviate suffering for the disadvantaged, rather than simply endorsing programs based on their perceived compassionate intent. Conservative Christians and pro-life advocates, in particular, are often subjected to intense scrutiny, portrayed as extremists when they articulate moral objections. Overcoming this challenge requires adopting a strategic approach to argumentation and asking incisive questions.
Strategic Engagement: Three Essential Questions
To effectively navigate contentious debates and expose unsupported claims, three crucial questions can be employed. These questions empower individuals to control the discussion, clarify ambiguities, and reveal the underlying assumptions and implications of opposing viewpoints.
Clarifying Terms: “What Do You Mean By That?”
The first question involves requesting a definition for ambiguous or emotionally charged terms. For instance, if an individual is labeled an “extremist,” a direct inquiry like, “What do you mean by that?” can expose the vacuous nature of the claim. If being “right” makes one an extremist, then the critic attempting to correct a viewpoint implicitly refutes their own stance by claiming to be right themselves. This immediate clarification highlights the logical inconsistency of the accusation.
This question is particularly effective when dealing with complex concepts such as “self-awareness” in the context of human value and the right to life. Different interpretations of self-awareness can lead to vastly different conclusions:
- Actual Self-Awareness: If this is the criterion, individuals would lose their right to life every time they sleep, as they are not actually self-aware in that state.
- Immediately Exercisable Capacity for Self-Awareness: This interpretation implies a loss of the right to life during conditions like anesthesia, where the capacity cannot be immediately exercised.
- Presence of Mental Hardware for Self-Awareness: This poses challenges for individuals with temporary brain damage who may recover, raising questions about their personhood status during recovery.
A lack of a clear answer to such definitional questions often indicates a weakness in the underlying premise.
Demanding Justification: “How Did You Come to That Conclusion?”
Once terms are clarified, the second vital question challenges the basis of the opponent’s conclusion: “How did you come to that conclusion?”. This prompts the individual to provide evidence or reasoning for their claims, forcing them to defend what might otherwise be an undefended premise. For example, if someone asserts that self-awareness is what confers value and a right to life, this question demands an explanation for why self-awareness, specifically, is value-giving.
It is crucial for advocates not to inadvertently validate the opponent’s premise by attempting to counter it using evidence that implicitly accepts their framework. For instance, citing the presence of brain waves in an embryo as early as 11 weeks, or the possibility of dreaming around 14 weeks, while factual, can be a strategic blunder. Such a response implicitly agrees with the premise that brain function or self-awareness is the determinant of value. Instead, the focus should remain on making the opponent defend their own claim regarding the chosen trait and its connection to value. This can be highlighted by asking, “Why is self-awareness the thing that gives us value and not, for example, having a belly button that points out rather than in?”.
Exploring Consequences: “Have You Considered the Implications of Your View?”
The third and often most impactful question delves into the logical and real-world consequences of an opponent’s view: “Have you considered the implications of your view?”. This helps expose the broader ramifications of a principle, which may be unpalatable even to the person advancing it.
If a right to life is predicated on a trait like self-awareness, significant problems arise:
- Human Equality Becomes Impossible: Self-awareness is not uniformly distributed among individuals; it fluctuates based on factors like alertness, cognitive traits, and even daily routines. Basing human value and a right to life on a property that varies among individuals and within a single lifetime inherently undermines the concept of human equality. It suggests that those with higher levels of self-awareness would possess a greater right to life than those with less, leading to a “savage definition of human equality” that effectively ceases to exist.
- Disqualification Beyond the Unborn: Applying the self-awareness criterion consistently extends beyond fetuses. Research, including secular studies, suggests that full self-awareness may not develop until a child is almost three years old. This logically implies that if self-awareness is the sole determinant of value and the right to life, then newborns and toddlers could also be considered expendable. While this conclusion is widely rejected in current culture, it is a direct and logical outcome of the proposed principle. The fundamental principle that the right to life is not intrinsic to a human being, but rather based on fluctuating traits not equally shared, inevitably leads to the dehumanization of more than just the unborn.
Beyond Performance: The Problem of Body-Self Dualism
Underlying many “performance arguments” for abortion – those that tie a right to life to abilities like self-awareness, environmental interaction, problem-solving, or pain perception – is a pervasive philosophical worldview known as body-self dualism. This view, regrettably prevalent in modern culture, proposes a dangerous assumption: that the “real me” is entirely separate from the biological body. According to body-self dualism, the body is merely physical matter, devoid of intrinsic purposes, which can be manipulated freely to fulfill the desires of the “cognitive self” – the true “you” defined by thoughts, desires, aims, wishes, and the ability to value one’s existence. It posits that the body provides no information about one’s identity.
This dualistic perspective is a foundational premise for arguments that distinguish between “human” and “person,” claiming, for instance, that the unborn are human but not persons. This arbitrary distinction is often employed to justify the killing of one class of human beings while prohibiting the killing of others. Advocates of this view, such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley, argue that “you” (the subject of consciousness or person with an identity) were not present in the fetal or newborn stages, thus rendering abortion and infanticide inconsequential. They differentiate between “biological life” and “biographical life,” with the latter commencing only when cognitive functions like self-awareness, valuing existence, and desires are present.
Body-self dualism also underpins many contemporary debates, including those surrounding transgenderism. The argument that one is “a woman trapped in a man’s body” directly reflects the belief that the physical body conveys nothing about identity, and that gender is solely a mental construct divorced from biological reality. In the context of abortion, this translates to the claim that no “real you” exists as a subject until specific cognitive traits develop.
Challenging Body-Self Dualism: Counterintuitive Consequences
Body-self dualism is deeply problematic and counterintuitive, leading to absurd conclusions that contradict everyday experience.
- The “No Hugs” Paradox: If identity resides solely in thoughts, desires, and feelings, distinct from the physical body, then physical interactions like hugging become nonsensical. One hugs bodies, not abstract desires. Thus, under this view, one could never truly “hug” their mother because her body is deemed irrelevant to her identity.
- The “Mass Murder” Paradox for Psychologists: Consider a psychologist treating a multi-personality disorder. If each distinct personality is considered a separate “subject of being” with its own desires and cognitive functions (as implied by body-self dualism), then successfully integrating or eliminating these personalities would logically constitute “mass murder”. This conclusion is universally rejected and highlights the absurdity of the premise.
- Contradiction with Human Experience: Our lived experience demonstrates a dynamic union of body and soul. When observing something, the eye (physical) takes in images, while the mind (immaterial) interprets and makes sense of them. This seamless integration supports a worldview where human beings are not merely disembodied minds but rather integrated wholes. Furthermore, the assumption that the mind is the “central me” is often made without sufficient justification.
Conclusion: Empowering Informed Advocacy
In an era of rapid information dissemination and sophisticated rhetorical tactics, it is critically important for individuals, particularly those advocating for the pro-life position, to be both well-informed and skeptical. Assurances made about legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act’s alleged inability to fund abortions, must be met with careful scrutiny and a willingness to investigate whether actual outcomes align with initial promises.
To effectively participate in these vital conversations, it is essential to be equipped with tools for persuasive argumentation and to discern hidden assumptions. The ability to pose strategic questions—“What do you mean by that?”, “How did you come to that conclusion?”, and “Have you considered the implications of your view?”—allows for intellectual engagement that clarifies terms, demands justification, and reveals the logical consequences of underlying worldviews. By consistently applying these principles, one can maintain focus on the central issue at hand: understanding the fundamental nature of the unborn. Developing these skills enables advocates to navigate complex debates confidently and persuasively, ensuring that truth and coherent reasoning prevail over misleading rhetoric and undefended premises.
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.
Hello friends. I don’t know about you, but I remember very keenly about 10 to 15 years ago being lectured by progressives that my concerns about Obamacare funding abortion were totally unfounded, that I was just using a scare tactic to drive people away from supporting the Affordable Care Act. Well, well, guess what? We’ve just learned that there are states like Maryland and other blue states that are drawing money from a fund that is part of the Affordable Care Act to pay the travel expenses for women who travel to their states to get abortions.
We were told over and over again, “No, you have nothing to worry about. This will never be used to fund abortion, and it’s a Christian duty to provide health care for the poor.” Now, set aside for the moment this assumption that government charity or government handout equals biblical charity. Set that aside for a moment. We’ll talk about that later perhaps. But what I want you to see is what we were told would never happen and that we were just using scaremongering techniques to do actually proved to be right.
We were correct. Obamacare is being used to fund abortion and it’s high time we tell the truth about this there. The news is all over the place today about Maryland using this special fund to provide for abortions and other states are following suit. So we need to be very careful about what we hear in the media. And what I want to mention for a moment here is this. I don’t know why. Well, I do know why. But the left loves to use compassion as a hammer that they hit conservatives with as if somehow if we raise any moral objection to any behavior they want to do or want to be legal.
We somehow are being uncristlike, not compassionate, and not caring for the poor. And then they will use that to hide what is really the true provision of the legislation they’re trying to advance. And in this case, the compassion angle was really nothing more than a Trojan horse because embedded within Obamacare is this special fund we now learn about that 15 years later is now paying out money to states to make abortion access easier for women who have to travel from red states where abortion is illegal to blue ones where it’s readily available.
So much for there being a guard against abortion. But I want to mention something else here. When you find yourself being grilled for your Christian worldview, whether it be on abortion or maybe it’s on you know your belief in intelligent design or maybe even on the gospel itself, it is often helpful to ask some very good questions. And I remember when Obamacare was being debated, I had a friend of mine say, you know, I don’t get it. Why do conservatives always oppose something that can help poor people?
Europe has socialized medicine. It’s worked very well for the poor over there. Why are you so opposed to it? And I remember replying to my friend. I said I’m opposed to it because there’s language in Obamacare that to me is fuzzy enough to allow for abortion funding. And I remember my colleague coming back saying something like, “Well, why are you so again opposed to the poor? Shouldn’t we air on the side of helping the poor even if there was fuzzy language?
We know for a fact that there are poor people going without health care. And why are you so opposed to the poor? Now, notice the hidden and undefended premises in that claim that I don’t care about the poor as a pro-lifer. Number one, there’s a hidden premise that government can do a better job caring for the poor than private charity can or better than market economies can do. No evidence was presented for that assumption, but there it was right there in the claim that my colleague was making.
And there’s another hidden defense there or a hidden premise there. And it goes like this. You don’t really care unless you support the big government program. Now, I think there’s something that we need to push back on here. It is one thing to have a heart for the poor. It is quite another to have a mind for the poor. In other words, be committed to what really will work to alleviate suffering for those that are disadvantaged. And what often happens is conservative Christians, pro-lifers, those who love biblical ethics are put on the hot seat.
People want to grill you and they want to make it look like you’re an extremist. Here is how you can fix that. You need to become adept at asking three very important questions we’re going to talk about today. The first question you need to learn to ask goes like this. Tell me what you mean by that. For example, if they call you an extremist, immediately ask for a definition. And I’ve had this happen many times. I’ll say, “You claim I’m an extremist.
What do you mean by that?” And often here’s the reply. Well, you think you’re right. Now, right away, you should be catching the problem with my critic’s objection to my view. Calling me an extremist not only does not refute my argument, it also shows the vacuous nature of the claim the critic is making. If claiming to be right makes you an extremist, well, then why is my critic correcting me? If it’s wrong to claim you’re right, who is he to say I’m wrong?
You see the problem? In the very act of correcting me, he refutes himself because if we’re never to correct people and if we’re an extremist because we claim to be right, then he thinks he’s right. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be correcting me. So, there’s a real problem with this. Simply asking the question, “What do you mean by that?” Fixes it. I remember another occasion where I was doing a pro-life talk at a university and a student raised his hand and said,”I like what you had to say.
You didn’t bring religion into this. You use science. You use philosophy, but nevertheless, I have a problem with your argument.” Oh, what’s that? I thought, okay, he said, “Here’s the problem. You are basically trying to tell us that an embryo that is not even self-aware yet is a human being with a right to life. How can you say that an embryo that is not even selfaware has a right to life? Now notice the hidden and undefended premise in his claim. His undefended claim was and it’s hidden where he doesn’t expressly say it but there it is.
He was basically saying that selfawareness is what gives us value and a right to life. But nowhere did he present an argument for that. It was simply hidden within the claim he was making against me. So here’s the question I question I asked. I asked two. The first one was what do you mean by selfawareness? Do you mean actual self-awareness? Because if that’s what you mean, that means we lose our right to life every time we go to bed at night and we go to sleep.
Because at that exact moment we go to sleep, we’re no longer actually self-aware. Do you mean having a an immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness? Well, if that’s the case, I have a right to life when I’m sleeping, but not when I’m put out for surgery and I’m under anesthesia because I wouldn’t have the immediately exercisable ability to be self-aware in that environment. Or do you mean I must have the mental hardware in place, the physical hardware of the brain in place in order to have self-awareness and a right to life?
The problem with that is what if someone is temporarily brain damaged but later they recover through therapy either through surgery or other things we might use drugs that can treat the brain. But if a person recovers does that mean they go from being a non-person until they have brain function that’s been restored? I mean it gets to get it gets really dicey is what I’m getting at here. He didn’t have a clear answer on that. But then I drove the dagger home when I asked the second question that you need to learn to ask and ask often.
It goes like this. How did you come to the conclusion that brain function, namely self-awareness, is what gives us value and a right to life? How did you come to that conclusion? In other words, what’s your evidence that self-awareness is value giving in the first place? He wanted to just sneak that undefended premise into his argument to challenge me without defending his own view. He’s the one implicitly making the claim that it’s selfawareness that gives us value. Now, of course, pro-lifers often go off the rails here because when someone brings up self-awareness, immediately they start talking about, “Oh, why?
We now know that that embryo has brain waves we can measure as early as week 11 and that they can dream in the womb perhaps as early as week 12 to 14.” Okay, even if that were true, and I question how we can know that, but let’s say it were true that that was the fact of the matter. They have brain activity we can measure by week 11 and they dream in the womb around 14 weeks. Let’s say that were true.
You still have made a big blunder in that when you cite that evidence at that moment, you’re basically agreeing with his premise that brain function or in this case self-awareness is what gives us value in the first place. I would rather take the easier way out. Make him defend his own claim. Hey, how self-aware do I have to be not to be killed? And why is self-awareness the thing that gives us value and not for example having a belly button that points out rather than in?
And then I can go from there to point out that he’s going to pay a very high price if he clings to that view that self-awareness is what gives us value. And that leads to the third question you need to become adept at asking. You need to first start with what do you mean by that? You secondly start with how did you come to that conclusion? And then thirdly, you need to ask this question. Have you considered the implications of your view?
Let’s go back to that student that challenged me on self-awareness. After he brought up the claim, and I question what he meant by the term self-awareness, I asked him how he came to that conclusion, which by the way, he had no answer for. He was just asserting it. Then I asked him to consider the realworld implications of his view that self-awareness is what gives us value and a right to life. Here’s what would follow from that view. Number one, it would mean that human equality would become impossible.
Why? Because if you look around a room of people, you will note that they are all more or less self-aware, more or less dialed into their cognitive traits, more or less awake, more or less dialed into what they might be observing in the environment around them. Look, self-awareness is all over the map with people depending on how much coffee you drink in the morning, right? So the idea that we can make human value in a right to life predicated upon a property that may come and go in our lifetimes and that none of us share equally means we’re left with a savage definition of human equality.
One that doesn’t exist at all because it would always come down to those who have more of that trait, in this case self-awareness, having a greater right to life than those with less. But if that’s true, if we’re basing human equality on traits that none of us share equally, your foundation for human equality is out the window. So again, you want to ask these questions. What do you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion? And have you considered the implications of your view?
Now, I did go on with that student to discuss the problem with self-awareness being the defining trait. Anyway, I went on to say, listen, if you’re going to say that self-awareness gives us value and a right to life, you not only have a problem with human equality, you have a problem with disqualifying a whole lot of people beyond just the unborn. For example, we now know that newborns are not self-aware and they have no sense of themselves existing over time. They do not yet value their own existence.
They do not yet have any interaction with their environment that is anything more than instinct. In fact, the latest research which I found very interesting, secular research, not pro-life research, indicates that selfawareness is not available to the child until almost age three. Which means if self-awareness is what gives us value and a right to life, then not only can you kill fetuses, you can kill newborns, you can kill toddlers, and that’s a price of course that nobody wants to own up to at this point in our culture.
Give it a few years, that may change, but that’s where we are now. And you have to help people say or see rather that when they put forward these traits as decisive, somebody is going to lose. And the people that will lose are much larger a sampling than what the critic wants to allow for. He wants to restrict his trait only to the abortion of the unborn. But you can’t do that. Once you advance the principle, and that’s the key thing here, the principle that your right to life is not intrinsic to you as a human being.
Rather, it is based on traits that come and go and that none of us share equally. Well, the principle is going to lead logically to the conclusion that you’re going to end up dehumanizing more than just the unborn. And I had to point that out to him. I think you can also point this out. His whole objection was based on a view of the human person that is deeply problematic. And we’ve mentioned this before and I want to return to it now.
There is a worldview of the human being idling in the background of all of these performance arguments for abortion. The ones that say, “Well, you don’t have a right to life till you can perform with self-awareness or you have the ability to interact with your environment or you have the ability to solve complex problems or you have the ability to feel pain. I don’t care what you pick out. Idling behind this is a world view known as body selfdualism. And quite frankly, that view of the human person is all over our culture right now.
And it’s one of the most dangerous assumptions out there. And precious few Christians are rising up to challenge it. Christians will be outspoken against transgenderism as they should be. They will be willing to mention abortion and that’s good but we need to also address some of the worldview thinking that’s idling in the background. All right, so think about this for a moment. When somebody tells you the unborn are human, but they’re not persons. Don’t accept the premise that there can be such a thing as a human being that’s not a person.
Step number one, make the person argue for it. Look at them and say, “Hey, what do you mean that the unborn are human, but not persons?” Have you ever met a human that wasn’t a person? I mean, those of you raising teenagers, you’re might you might be thinking right now, “Yeah, just come to my house. I’ll show you a bunch of them.” But set that aside for a moment. In truth, have we ever met a human that wasn’t a person? Of course not.
This is an arbitrary distinction that people put up when they want to justify killing one class of human beings and not justify killing another. But that it doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to give me a good argument for why I should believe there can be such a thing as a human that’s not a person. But I want you to notice some more here. Why on earth should anybody accept the claim that the real me has nothing to do with my biological body?
And that’s precisely the major premise in body self dualism. That the real you has nothing to do with your body. Your body has no intrinsic purposes that it’s designed to fulfill. And it’s really just mere physical matter that you are free to manipulate any way you want to fulfill the desires of the real you which is your cognitive self. On body self dualism the real you is not your body in any way at all. It is rather your thoughts, your desires, your aims, your wishes and your ability to value your existence.
In other words, your body tells us nothing about your identity. So you’ll get people like Peter Singer who will argue and Michael Tulie, I might add, who will argue things like, “Well, there was no you there in the fetal and newborn stages. So abortion and infanticide are no big deal because after all, there’s no subject of consciousness there. There’s no person with an identity there.” Now, that’s of course different than the way David Bunan’s going to argue. David Bunan’s going to argue you were there from the one cell stage, but you don’t have the same right to life then as you do now.
You only get that right to life when you can immediately exercise desires. So for Boon, the right to life is an is an accidental property you gain when you develop enough. But for guys like Tuli Singer, Jubelini Manurva and others, they would argue you were not there at the one cell stage. That wasn’t you. That was something else. There was a biological entity there that is biologically a human being. They will concede that. But they want to draw a distinction between biological life and what they would term biographical life.
And the biographical you does not start until you have cognitive functions like self-awareness, valuing your existence and desires to name just a few. And if you don’t have those, you are a potential rational agent but not an actual one. So what do we do with something like this? Well, I think one of the most helpful things to do is to begin asking kinds of questions that will get at the fundamental worldview the person is articulating there. So, I might say something like this.
You say the unborn are not human or that they’re you say the unborn are human, but they’re not persons. Tell me what you mean by person. And they will begin articulating someone that has thoughts, desires, memories independent of their body, that their bodily development doesn’t mean anything. Of course, then I can ask the question, how did you come to the conclusion that our bodies say nothing about our identity? How did you get there? What’s your reasoning process? They need to argue for that.
It’s not enough to just assert it. And the problem is the culture is so bought in to body self dualism that people hardly question this anymore. This is why you get a transgender person who says, “Look, I’m really a woman trapped in a man’s body as if his body tells us nothing about his identity.” And that’s the whole argument for men competing in women’s sports, right? That gender is a construct of the mind. It is not something related to our physical body or any intrinsic purposes our body might have.
It plays out in abortion this way. There’s no real you there as a subject until you have desires, until you have an ability to see yourself existing over time or whatever other traits they toss in there. But here’s the thing. Body self-dualism is deeply problematic. And I’m going to give you just a couple of ways it is. I won’t burden you with a whole lot, but here’s the first problem with body self dualism. It’s counterintuitive. I don’t know about you, but I’ve hugged my mother, and I’m sure you’ve hugged yours.
But if body self dualism is true, you haven’t hugged your mother because you can’t hug aims, desires, and feelings about wants for the future. You hug bodies. But if your mother’s body has nothing to do with her identity, then that means you’ve never hugged your mother. That’s craziness. It would also mean that anytime a psychologist cures a multi-personality disorder in someone, suppose you got someone who has multiple personalities and they’re the they’re a mess. And the psychologist or psychiatrist or maybe both as a team functioning together, they manage to rid this person of the false personalities they’ve been carrying around in their mind.
Well, if body self dualism is true, the psychiatrist and the psychologist in this case have just committed mass murder because they eliminated subjects of beings that had desires, that had feelings, that had desires to go on living, that had the ability to interact with their environments on a cognitive level, and that would mean they’d be hauled off to jail. I mean, I think you can see how absurd this is, but I think it’s also counterintuitive because it isn’t how we function in life. If you’re watching this show right now, two things are happening.
Your eye is making physical contact with the screen and then your mind, the immaterial you is making sense of what your physical eye is taking in. Your eye takes in the images, the mind makes sense of it. Well, that fits squarely with a Christian worldview that says human beings are a dynamic union of body and soul. And then finally, I could ask the critic this. I could say, “Hey, why should I believe that my mind is the central me?” Make him argue for that.
Don’t let these assumptions go unchallenged. Push back on them. We’re going to take a break. When we come back, I want to mention one other thing that I’ve seen floating around lately that we need to address. I’ll pick that up on the other side.
Welcome back everyone. Great to have you with us. I want to mention one more thing before we conclude the show today. If you have not already gotten a copy of our new CA or our new course called the pro-life 101, I will get my act together here eventually. I think I think my personhood level has dropped today. I need more caffeine. I’m not thinking straight. If you have not had a chance to view our course called Prolife 101, here’s the beauty of it.
Within one week, you will be equipped to handle arguments from the other side and state your own case persuasively. I commend that to your viewing. I hope you’ll go there. Now, I can just see some push back from someone who might say, “Well, where did you find what you mentioned earlier online? This idea that Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, is now being used to fund abortion when we were promised that would never happen. Well, I’m looking at an article right here on my screen, and we’ll make this available to you from NPR.
Okay, NPR is not a pro-life conservative source. It is a left-wing mouthpiece and they are admitting in this article that the Affordable Care Act is now funding to help pay for abortion care. So, we’ll have that article available to you so that if critics question you on this, you can refer back to it. And by the way, when I looked at this article initially, I noticed that it was not the only source. I see it in Political Politico, the journal there.
The Hill is talking about it. We’re also seeing it on the New York Times piece and the and the Baltimore Sun. So, it’s out there. It’s But we’ll send you the or we’ll put up for you the NPR link and that should be a source that no liberal is going to question you on. If NPR says it must be true. As far as the left is concerned, all of this gets to a point I want to close with today. It is vitally important as proiffers that we know how to argue for our view, but we also need to be willing to be detectives and be skeptical of people who say, “Oh, this bill we want to put forward won’t fund abortions.
It won’t promote abortion.” And yet then we learn later it most certainly does. So you’re right to be skeptical. Do not let critics just shove you aside and say you’re being, you know, someone who doesn’t give a rip about the poor. Rather ask those three questions we talked about today. What do you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion? And have you considered the implications of your view? My colleague Greg Kokal does a great job unpacking those question in his questions in his book tactics.
I commend that to your reading. But for now remember stay focused on the main thing. What is the unborn?