Myth busted: Planned Parenthood and federal funding

Kirsten Powers at The Daily Beast has a devastating op-ed concerning Planned Parenthood's federal funding. (It's worth noting this web site isn't exactly right-wing journalism.) She points to studies showing that Planned Parenthood's strategy of providing cheaper birth control doesn't actually lead to fewer abortions.

Over this time period [2000-2011], the U.S. government has funneled billions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, in large part because the organization claims to provide services to avoid unplanned pregnancies – a laudable goal. Yet despite a robust budget—Planned Parenthood reported a total annual revenue of $1.1 billion in its last financial filing—the organization has done absolutely nothing to change the fundamental dynamics of the United States’ abortion rate.

Asked about the “Contraception” study, the Guttmacher numbers and why no women were saying they got abortions due to lack of access to contraception, a Planned Parenthood spokesman emailed this Orwellian response: “I think the biggest barrier is access to affordable contraception.” Huh?

Powers goes on to say:

It’s unclear whether Planned Parenthood officials simply don’t understand statistics or are so accustomed to having their claims unquestioned that they think if they repeat them often enough, the facts will disappear.

I suspect the latter.

This quote pretty much sums it up:

To preserve its federal subsidy, Planned Parenthood continues to claim that without its contraception services the abortion rate will go up. This deception smacks of a fleecing of taxpayers in an effort to promote an ideological agenda, rather than a sincere effort to help women plan families.

That's what some of us have been saying for years, but it turns out Orwellian propaganda really does work.

Attacking Universalism

Rob Bell has just come out with a new about final judgment. The book, entitled, Love Wins, seems like it's going to defend universalism.



Kevin DeYoung over at The Gospel Coalition does not like this one bit. He lists eight reasons why we need the wrath of God. Here they are:

1. First, we need God’s wrath to keep us honest about evangelism.
2. Second, we need God’s wrath in order to forgive our enemies.
3. Third, we need God’s wrath in order to risk our lives for Jesus’ sake.
4. Fourth, we need God’s wrath in order to live holy lives.
5. Fifth, we need God’s wrath in order to understand what mercy means.
6. Sixth, we need God’s wrath in order to grasp how wonderful heaven will be.
7. Seventh, we need the wrath of God in order to be motivated to care for our impoverished brothers and sisters.
8. Eighth, we need God’s wrath in order to be ready for the Lord’s return.

You see? If people aren't going to hell, what's the point of telling them about Jesus? And yes, we forgive our enemies, but only because we know they'll be burning in hell. And God knows the only thing worth dying for is a message of eternal cruelty to those who do wrong. Why would I ever do good if I weren't afraid of God's wrath? Especially caring for the poor--I don't know anyone who does that who doesn't believe in hell.

You get the idea. I find DeYoung's thinking on this issue genuinely perverse and morally bankrupt. I agree with the Gospel Coalition on one thing: bad theology hurts people. But it isn't Rob Bell's theology that is hurting people.

Neoclassical Liberalism

There's a new blog called "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" and their goal appears to be to defend a political philosophy called "neoclassical liberalism." Essentially, it seems like libertarianism with a respect for social justice. Here's an excerpt from the opening post:

What we have in common on this blog is an appreciation for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods – and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

This may very well be the direction my own political philosophy is going right now, given my fundamental misgivings about libertarianism (for instance, I don't think the case for liberty can be grounded in the concept of "self-ownership"). I was especially intrigued by Jason Brennan's article on a "higher liberalism." So far the writers there have simply done a little bit of orientation, defining terms for future discussion. I look forward to reading how their arguments unfold.

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

Language and Reason

Pyman discusses Florensky's attempt at "an answer to the eighteenth-century dispute between Church and Enlightenment as to whether language is God's gift to man or the creation of the peoples who speak it and the individuals who us it. Florensky's take of this dispute is conciliatory:

it is precisely in this contradiction, and in its extreme acuity, that language as eternal, steadfast, unchanging Reason, as pre-human Logos, is in fact conceivable as something at the same time infinitely close to the soul of each one of us, affectionately supple to the heart, personal in its every moment, its every movement and expressive of utmost individuality."

I see what Florensky's getting at here, but my suspicion here is that the Church and the Enlightenment were both wrong, and that even a conciliatory view of their positions is insufficient. I'm more convinced by a view of language as a cultural artifact, a "product of human action but not human design." I am a skeptic when it comes to language being so closely tied to "eternal, steadfast, unchanging Reason." There is a reason why words are so hard to define, why Socratic dialogs never reach firm conclusions. Language is grown; it does not transcend the created order, but is a product of the physical passage of time.

In other words, no matter how in tune we are with eternal truth, we still have no firm or final way to express this. "Out of the mouths of babes and infants..."

Florensky on Ontology

From Avril Pyman's biography on Florensky, quoting Florensky:

The basic self-awareness of humanity, that 'I live in the world and with the world', presupposes the existence, the real existence as reality, of both myself, humanity as such, and that which is outside myself, which exists apart from me or, more exactly, independently of human awareness ... In the act of cognisance it is impossible to separate subject from object; cognisance is at once the one and the other; more exactly, it is precisely the cognisance of the object by the subject, a unity, that is, in which the one can be distinguished from the other only in the abstract, yet at the same time the object is not obliterated by the subject, neither is the latter dissolved in the object of cognisance exterior to itself. Moreover, once unified, they do not engulf one another even though, while maintaining their mutual independence, they are no longer divided. The theological formula without confusion and without separation is fully applicable to the cognitive interrelationship of subject and object...

In other words, subjective and objective are analogous to the two natures of Christ--both bound up together as one, yet fully distinct. It is a paradox on which the pursuit of all knowledge depends.

Self-referential signs

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Mental liberty

Talking to my grad student friends about teaching reveals a lot of agreement. For instance, one of the things that strikes all of us who teach calculus is the way our students tend to ask this particular question:

Am I allowed to do that?

Are you allowed to do that? I think to myself. Who ever suggested to you that you were somehow under someone's authority? Notice what the student doesn't ask. She doesn't ask, "Is this true?" She doesn't ask, "Is this the correct meaning of the symbol I'm using?" She doesn't even ask, "Will this get me the right answer?" Just a simple, submissive question: Am I allowed to do this?

Semantics, you say. All of those questions are really just different ways of asking the same thing. Nonsense! It is no accident that students ask this wretched question. From the time they are little children, they are trained to think that truth is a matter of authority. They are trained to look in the back of the book for answers to their math problems, they are trained to solve problems using the exact step by step process spoon fed to them by their teachers, and they are trained out of the creativity they once possessed as children. Because they also happen to be imbibed with an American sense of anti-authoritarianism, they simply become relativists, not having any sense of truth as an objective reality. American individualism notwithstanding, this view of truth degrades human freedom and is the source of all political evil.

I try to tell my students, There are no rules! You are constrained solely by what is true! Only a free person understands this; indeed, it is the definition of freedom. You are never free of all constraints. Objective reality does not give in to your whims. But you are free to poke it and prod it as you wish. What students fundamentally misunderstand about their education is the relationship between themselves and reality. They believe that in some aspects they can stand in authority over reality, whereas in others they must bow in submission. Neither is correct; the human mind never transcends the world, but neither is it simply drifting in the wind.

In short, no one can be free from God; but to be free of every will that is not God's is true freedom. There is a reason we call it liberal education--it is the education of free people. It is not my students' ability to reason quantitatively that I most worry about. What I worry about is their desire for truth, which is fundamentally linked to their creativity and above all their ability to exist as free people. Truly, no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven except as a child. It is when we lose our child-like tendency to ask questions out of sheer curiosity, to poke and prod and play with, to seek out boundaries and see how far we can push them--then we lose our freedom, and with it our thirst for truth, and with that the things that make us most fully human.