Some people – generally those who openly identify with what is nebulously called “the left,” think it’s an old chestnut that there’s a “liberal bias” in mainstream media. That claim, they might suppose, is just a case of whining conservatives who don’t like the media telling it like it is. Anyone can pontificate on generalities. I’d rather give you an example.

This time the credit goes to the Verum Serum blog (a fantastic blog I have recently discovered) for bringing this example to my attention. Remember George Tiller? He was an abortionist who carried out very late term abortions – literally killing babies at a point in their lives where other babies of the same age were being delivered in maternity wards. He was shot dead by a man who opposed what he was doing, and he became the darling of the media for a while. He served, in the minds of many, largely thanks to this coverage, as a reminder of the dangerous “right wing” ideology simmering beneath the surface of the pro-life movement, and his death was used as a justification for accusations against conservatives as being “neo Nazis,” some pro-choicers going as far as to advocate killing pro-lifers and their families in retribution to even things up a little.

It’s likely that you had heard of George Tiller. Now think fast – who is Jim Pouillon?

Unless you already had a special interest in the abortion issue (or you have read or heard comments about him from someone who has such an interest), I’m pretty certain that you don’t know who Jim Pouillon is. He was a pro life advocate who was shot dead for holding a sign. Apparently his message in defence of the unborn irritated somebody.

Mainstream media outlets Time, the LA Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined, gave the death of George Tiller a total of sixty separate pieces of writing, using up 46,556 words. That’s the size of a master’s thesis. By contrast, these same media outlets printed twelve stories that mentioned the shooting of Jim Pouillon (Time included none at all, compared with at least nine stories on George Tiller’s shooting), using up 5,339 words. Comparing this murder to the murder of George Tiller In coverage space, that’s a ratio of about 1:8.7. These media outlets thought that it was almost nine times more important to make sure you knew about an abortionist being shot than to tell you about the murder of a pro-lifer. In the LA Times and Washington post the average was even worse, a 1:20 ratio.

This is to say nothing of the intensely negative stance taken towards Poullion (a stance bordering on depicting the man as more or less deserving what he got) with the overflowing admiration for Tiller. These stats alone say nothing about the way that such stories recalled past acts of violence against abortionists or abortion clinics, but are completely silent on any other acts of aggression towards pro lifers. When Mr Pouillon was shot dead in the street, no newspaper implied that it was time for pro choice advocates to “go into damage control mode.”

John’s comments from Verum Serum are so apt (bold and italtics are mine):

It’s impossible to look at the numbers, not to mention the tone of the coverage itself, and avoid the obvious conclusion that the press has a dog in this fight. The reporters writing these stories are nearly all pro-choice. So are the editors assigning the stories and writing the headlines. As a result, right-wing violence garners a lot more media coverage. It’s not a conspiracy, just confirmation bias in action.

And it extends far beyond this story. Did you know that a Crisis Pregnancy Center in Arizona was burned out just before Christmas? Probably not since not a single major media outlet covered the story. But if someone sets fire to an abortion clinic you can bet it will be national news.

Sadly, the MSM’s story selection eventually forms a kind of conventional wisdom, one that suggests “right-wing” is the natural prefix for “extremism.” In contrast, examples of left-wing violence are just a blip, a local crime story with no national implications worth mentioning if the story is mentioned at all.

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Whatever else he thinks about anything, Professor Robert Winston just won some brownie points with me. He calls the worship of New Zealand’s celebrities a “false idolatry” that glorifies traits that, in the big picture, really don’t matter all that much.

Lord Winston believes Kiwis do not value intellectuals and ignore the worst behaviour of our sports stars. “New Zealand celebrates attributes which really aren’t that important,” he said.

“You do it with sportsmen and you don’t do it particularly with intellectuals, for example. In New Zealand, being an intellectual is slightly disadvantageous and is often seen by the press as being something which is rather well, not to be celebrated.

“On the other hand, if you are a great rugby player, maybe parts of your private life which are pretty appalling, will go ignored.

Check out the audio at the news story.

If I had a Christmas list, Winston would be on it.

Glenn Peoples

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"Bishop" Brian Tamaki

It’s not common to find a well resourced and organised, well presented, enthusiastically socially proactive, theologically conservative (for the most part) and outspoken Christian church in New Zealand. The combination of all four is a rare commodity. So in recent history when Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church showed up, it naturally attracted a lot of attention, both good and bad. It was all of those things – plus a few other things. But in part because of those four things all together, it was like a lighthouse for a number of disenfranchised Christians who felt that other churches really weren’t going to make the kind of difference they wanted to see.

Added to this package, however, were a few other things – things often seen as the darker side of some Pentecostal churches. There had always been an intense focus on the church’s leadership, in this case just one man, Brian Tamaki, who took the title “bishop” in spite of the church not having an episcopal leadership model. All of the church’s publicity, including its own television broadcasts, were centred on one individual. Mr Tamaki was at the centre not because of any qualifications that made him knowledgeable or especially skilled at anything in particular, but rather because of the belief that he is God’s chosen man. A very strong emphasis in Mr Tamaki’s teaching on submission to church leadership (I’ll never forget – “If you don’t have a pastor, you’re heading for disaster”) was also a concern for many, as it raised the spectre of unquestionable authority, or at very least the sustained focus on such submission suggested an unhealthy imbalance towards human authority. It’s also a common feature in charismatic movements like this – and Destiny is no exception – that a great deal of authority to teach the Christian faith is vested in those who at times almost seem to flaunt the fact that they have no theological training. Such, we might be told sometimes, is the stuff of old stuffy religious people in ivory towers, all we really need is a strong leadership above us, a leadership that is in touch with God. In the eyes of many, it’s like a 16 year old boy with no licence being given the fastest car in town. A respect for one’s teaching that has not been earned, but which is taken very seriously by the flock.
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Ian Harris tells us (“Honest to God,” Dominion Post, [Dominion Post. Saturday July 11, 2009. Page B5], reproduced at the YesVote website) that we should reject the “harsh views” on child rearing found in the Bible.

Mr Harris, unfortunately, joins many of those who promote the criminalisation of good parents by muddying the waters. He notes, for example, that someone who defends the right to use physical discipline also believes that children (like adults) are sinners. He then announces that since “progressive” Christians (by which he seems to mean those who no longer accept Christian theology) realise that this is based on an antiquated view, we should likewise reject the right to use physical discipline and we should criminalise those who do.

It is difficult to interact charitably with those who support the ban on smacking if this is the contorted way they are going to reason about the subject. Whether or not one thinks the theology held by some supporters of the right to use physical discipline is correct is quite a different matter from whether or not one thinks they ought to be made into criminals, surely!

Unfortunately again, Mr Harris attempts to use his platform as a mouthpiece of liberal (what he calls “progressive) Christianity to give credence to scientific claims that are obviously subject to great dispute. He makes the sweeping claim that this nebulous thing called “modern research” (while he cites no actual studies) shows that although corporal punishment does help bring about short-term compliance, it does not help a child to “internalise positive values for the longer term.”

I am constantly bemused by the way in which conservative religious spokespeople are ridiculed even when they do cite research, but obvious nonsense like this can be peddled by the liberal voices without so much as a single scholarly citation, and nobody is expected to bat an eyelid.

But even if what Mr Harris says is correct, the implication is that corporal punishment in and of itself has short term benefits and no long term ill effects. Hardly something to be prosecuting people for! The reality is that the effects he cites are perfectly compatible with the good of corporal punishment. Such punishment usually is administered to children when they are not willing to reason or reflect on the long term consequences of their actions. It is for when children are being unruly and unwilling to listen. Circumstances in which they are willing to do so are the circumstances under which corporal punishment is less necessary (meaning that the older a child becomes, the less frequent a smack will become). None of this gives the careful reader any reason to think that the occasional smack is immoral, much less worthy of criminal prosecution.

Bereft of compelling moral or scientifically grounded arguments, Mr Harris turns instead to arousing prejudice against the religious convictions of those who disagree with him about child discipline. Unable to find anything strong enough in what all Christians consider their holy book, he reaches into the book of Ecclesiasticus (part of the so-called “apocryphal” writings that did not make up part of the Hebrew canon) to find the claim that “he who loves his son will whip him often.”

But not only has Mr Harris strayed into literature that the so-called “fundamentalists” (most of whom would identify as conservative Protestants) that he attacks do not even regard to be part of the Bible at all, he has clearly sought out the most extreme translation of the verse that he can find. He conjures up grizzly pictures of leering parents towering, horsewhip in hand, over the broken and bleeding bodies of little children with misleading language like this.

But just a few minutes research would dispel this attempt. The New American translation reads, “He who loves his son chastises him often.” The Douay Rheims translation (the Catholic Bible, which does include this book as part of the canon) reads “He that loveth his son, frequently chastiseth him.” The old King James version, the one that “fundamentalists” are most likely to read if the read this book at all, reads “He that loveth his son causeth him oft to feel the rod.” Of course, because it’s a metaphor for physical discipline that’s probably still too much for Mr Harris, but needless to say, it robs him of his “whipping” bogeyman.

After the rhetorical debris is stripped away, all that’s really left is a string of namecalling and fearful language. He calls the views of his opponents “repugnant.” He calls them “fundamentalists” with “antiquated” views that are opposed to “progressive” thought. But where’s the actual substance? Like much of the rhetorical fireworks that is being leveled at those who want the law changed to a common sense view that refuses to place thousands of good parents in the criminal category, Ian Harris offers more heat than light, and manifests just the sort of shallowness and bias that this debate could do without.

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David Bain was found not guilty of murder, but given the rather divisive nature of the high profile case, there are still people who believe that he committed the murders of his family in 1994. This raises in my mind an interesting question about what people are allowed to say about their beliefs in public. In particular, it raises the question of what does and does not count as defamation or libel.

If a person were to accuse me of being a murderer and as a result I suffered some sort of loss, I could sue that person or those persons for defamation (or libel if it was published). But what do we say in the aftermath of a somewhat controversial court case when someone says “I still think he did it.” It’s obvious that what this amounts to is the claim that “David Bain is a murderer.” Could this be defamation?

One completely adequate defence to the charge of defamation is the defence of truth. If what you’re saying is true, then it’s just too bad for the person who suffers loss. The facts are what they are. But the court has determined in the case of David Bain that the truth of the murder charge cannot be upheld. So that defence wouldn’t work if you were sued for defamation. [EDIT: See the comments. This is not quite true in a civil case like defamation, as the standard of proof is different from a criminal trial.] However a second and much more widely used defence against a claim of defamation is the defence of a reasonably held belief. Even if you might be quite mistaken, you are permitted to express an opinion even if it does cause loss to another person provided the opinion is a reasonably held opinion. That is, as long as you have genuine reasons for holding it (“genuine” here is meant to rule out silly things like racial bigotry, foolishly believing gossip, drug induced mental states and so forth),  you have a defence and you haven’t defamed anyone.

Here’s where things get interesting. Given the court’s not guilty verdict, could you reasonably hold the opinion that David Bain committed the crime of murder (or even a lesser crime like manslaughter)? As always let me be clear – I do not hold that opinion. The question is clearly not unique to the David Bain trial. The question applies equally to any person found not guilty of murder (e.g. O J Simpson). I don’t know if you can in fact reasonably hold that belief, but I am absolutely certain of this: The fact that a jury found him not guilty does not mean that you can’t reasonably believe that he is guilty. Remember that a “not guilty” verdict means that the prosecution has failed to show beyond reasonable doubt that the person committed the act. In other words, the verdict means that a person who doubts that David Bain committed these murders is not being unreasonable. But this clearly does not mean that a person who believes that he did commit the murders is being unreasonable.

Let’s call the claim that the accused committed the crime “C.” There is nothing at all strange about the observation that it might be reasonable for someone to believe C and also reasonable for a person to believe ~C (the denial of C). Obviously C and ~C cannot both be true, but I’m not talking about which claim is factually correct.

In fact, to say that it would count as defamation to say that David Bain committed the crime has some scary consequences. It would mean, for example, that if you’re being interviewed in the media and someone says to you “so, do you think the jury got it right?” you are legally obligated not to say no, or you have committed an offence. It literally closes to door to even debating the reliability of juries.

This is not to say, of course, that you’re free to call David Bain a murderer. Not at all! Just as the jury’s verdict does not make it unreasonable to hold the belief that he committed the crime, the fact that the verdict only indicates the presence of reasonable doubt does not mean that your belief in Bain’s guilt is a reasonably held belief. If you’re caught accusing him, be prepared to show that your belief is in fact reasonable.

Glenn Peoples

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It has been all over news sites for a little while now (e.g. see here). President Barack Hussein Obama has – according to the headlines at least – lifted a ban on stem cell research.

(Incidentally, Obama made some political mileage lying about political opponents by saying that they opposed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research but the reality is, McCain has consistently supported it no less than Obama, so it’s not a republican vs democrat issue).

I raised an eyebrow a couple of days ago when I sat down to watch the 6 o’clock news and was greeted with the announcement that “New Zealand Doctors will carry out operations using stem cells” (see here for a newspaper report on this). The only reason I was initially surprised is that I had unconsciously bought into the trick (perpetuated by the headlines) that has been used: Get people to think that stem cell research = embryonic stem cell research, so that every time people point out that “stem cells” have incredibly useful properties, the impression is reinforced that embryonic stem cell research is the only way to make use of those properties. As it turns out, New Zealand doctors aren’t doing anything with embryonic stem cells. They are going to carry out procedures on patients with paralysis using stem cells taken from the adult patients’ own bodies.

Which brings me back to the start of this blog entry. Barack Obama has not lifted a ban on stem cell research. He hasn’t. There is not and was not a ban on stem cell research. Stem cell research is a promising scientific endeavour that promises much to people with debilitating conditions, and I support it fully. There was a ban, put in place by G W Bush, on stem cell research using human embryos. Adult stem cell research has been an active frontier in groundbreaking research for some years now, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The scientific and medical advances seen there are simply phenomenal. The example in New Zealand that I referred to earlier is just one demonstration of this. The properties that stem cells have that make them so great are the same properties that embryonic stem cells have. The more we know about adult stem cells, the more this is confirmed.

It has been known for about 30 years that stem cells are present in the tissue of the adult, but it was assumed that they could only form cells of a particular tissue. That is, reprogramming them was considered impossible. In recent years, however, pluripotent stem cells were discovered in various human tissues–in the spinal cord, in the brain, in the mesenchyme (connective tissue) of various organs, and in the blood of the umbilical cord. These pluripotent stem cells are capable of forming several cell types–principally blood, muscle, and nerve cells. It has been possible to recognize, select, and develop them to the point that they form mature cell types with the help of growth factors and regulating proteins.

From “The Case for Adult Stem Cell Research” – see that page for some fascinating reading on adult stem cell research. ]

What proponents of embryonic stem cell research are striving for is not simply the ability to use stem cells and help people (although I’m sure they want this). What they are doing is making the issue about whether it’s acceptable to destroy embryos. That is the issue, because even without destroying embryos, we can do stem cell research. Think of it this way: Just imagine that I advocated killing black people and taking their stem, cells. People say to me, “black people? Why kill them? If we want stem cells for medical treatment, we can just get them from the patients themselves.” I reply: “Don’t you care about people with parkinson’s disease? Stop standing in the way of science. We need to kill black people if this is going to work.” It wouldn’t take long before people realised that I didn’t simply want the right to use stem cells. I wanted to legitimise the killing of black people by appealing to a certain goal, a goal that you know full well I could reach without killing black people.

So the issue is not about conservatives standing in the way of science, which is the innuendo present in local news coverage of Obama’s actions. The intentional impression has been that until Obama’s decision, there was no hope of using stem cell therapy to help people with diseases like Parkinson’s, or people with spinal damage. Folk like Michael J. Fox appeared on TV leading people to think that only now has such technology been allowed to be unshackled. Not so. It’s all smoke and mirrors, concealing the real change.

The other issue, of course, is that killing black people for their stem cells would still be wrong even if there was no other way to get stem cells. Imagine shooting a black man dead, syringing out his stem cells, injecting them into yourself and being healed, only to be applauded by a crowd of onlookers with cheers of “Oh boy, who could disagree with stem cell research NOW?” This point was made brilliantly in a South Park episode called “Krazy Kripples.” Observe:

Glenn Peoples

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I found this on my hard drive. It’s a short piece I wrote back in 2005, shortly after the funeral of Pope John Paul II.

The Pope: Do They Love Him or Hate Him?

Moral Integrity vs Popular Tokenism

On Friday the 8^th of April (New Zealand Time), the city of Rome saw its biggest funeral of all time, the funeral of Karol Jozef Wojtyla, better known to the world as Pope John Paul the second.

I watched with interest as current affairs show Campbell Live interviewed from Rome funeral attendee Catherine Hebblethwaite, co-author of The Next Pope. She explained, as host John Campbell nodded in agreement, that while many millions of people may have disagreed with the Pope’s teaching on moral issues, they nonetheless all looked up to him as a “great moral figure” worthy of respect and admiration. In fact this is not an isolated perspective. From a wide range of people, politicians, celebrities and Hollywood stars, religious figures and so forth, the message is fairly consistent. “While we disagree with his views, we think he is a great moral ‘figure’.” Well actually, that’s half true. People usually don’t say that they disagree with his views now that he’s dead, they just happen to have spent the last decade vilifying them.

Just how much sense does this really make?

What does it take to make somebody a great moral teacher, leader or figure? Presumably, one would think, it has something to do with a person’s take on moral issues. If the stances that a person takes are moral, and if they teach and encourage their admirers to uphold moral virtue and avoid moral vice, then they’re a great moral teacher. Right? If some aging Palestinian went around telling all his followers to go to crowded transport terminals and blow themselves up, or if a writer encouraged all his readers to molest children, or if he preached to the masses and urged them to burn down the homes of black people, we wouldn’t call him a great moral teacher. He would have to preach a message that we really do embrace and consider moral. He would have to be a person who upholds what we consider to be morally virtuous and noble. He could not be somebody who taught against the moral values that we hold dear, or we would not consider him moral.

What is it about the Pope then, that makes leaders like Helen Clark, along with Hollywood celebrities and just about everyone else, say that he was a great moral teacher or leader? What is it about him that appeals to their moral senses?

Could it be the way the Pope shared their commitment to personal sexual autonomy, and how he managed to avoid the shackles of traditional sexual mores when it comes to stuffy old institutions like Christian marriage? Maybe it was the way he said that all relationship choices as equally valid, regardless of whether one comes to embrace heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or anything else? Perhaps they think his morals were top-notch because of the way he viewed a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of her right to use her body as she sees fit? Or perhaps they were attracted to his stance on sexual safety, how he agreed with them that condoms save lives and provide the answer to avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, rather than prattling on about outdated moral artefacts like abstinence. Yes, it’s just obvious why so many people praise this moral figure. Clearly he spoke their mind!

There is the odd exceptional person who is honest about it all. Some people realize that it’s dishonest to go about moping and mourning the loss of a “great moral teacher” while believing that he was really a moral idiot who got just about everything wrong as far as morality is concerned. Occasionally you’ll hear somebody say, “Why are we sobbing in the streets over the inevitable death of a man who, in reality, didn’t have much time for those of us who didn’t toe his company line?”¹

But where are the Hollywood celebrities who say “The Pope claimed that abortion is morally on par with murder. He condemned the homosexual lifestyle as immoral. He said that women ought not to be priests. He believed that abstinence, rather than condoms, is the way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. He said that people who have sex outside of marriage are sinning. Yes, he really was a great moral teacher.” It’s strange that while we hear all this trendy talk about what a great moral figure he was, we never hear about which aspects of his morality made him so great. It seems Hollywood stars and Helen Clark have one thing in common: They know which side of their bread gets the butter. If they tell the truth about what they think about the Pope’s moral teaching, they’ll end up calling him a bigot, and they’ll be unpopular. So instead they opt for some suitably vague patronising rubbish about what a great moral figure the guy was, in the hopes that people will saw “aww, they really do care!”

Before anybody gets all up-in-arms at me for having a go at a nice old man who has just died, I’m not. I’m having a go at people who say that they are sad at the Pope’s death because he was a great moral figure, when in reality they think he was a morally twisted bigot. I think the pope was a great moral teacher because I think, generally speaking, that he was correct in the moral views he upheld. That’s the difference between having moral integrity when you say that somebody was a good man, and being a hypocrite who bows to popular politically correct token gestures and poseurism. Say what you mean, the public is not so stupid that we don’t know it already.

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The novel-turned-movie The Golden Compass has apparently become a huge flop for New Line Cinema, and the director Chris Weitz is pretty unhappy. Apparently the movie “tanked so badly that the second and third installments are not going to be made.”

A very likely culprit is the anti-Christian theme of the book, apparently admitted by the author (Philip Pullman) himself, announcing an intention “to undermine Christianity.” Who would have foreseen it – a holiday children’s movie that (according to the source at the link) trashes the Old Testament and isn’t a smashing success?

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