By Dave Andrusko
Margaret Doyle is removed by Capitol Police from the General Assembly Building in Richmond , Virginia
What’s the adage? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me? We will have to coin a new adage that covers fooling the public and attempting to intimidate state legislators. Let me explain what I mean.
Pro-lifers who’ve fought the legislative wars were never fooled by the media portrait, either about what happened last year in state legislatures, nor predicted for 2012. As a reflection of the tremendous gains made in the 2010 elections, pro-lifers did pass an enormous amount of legislation, although never as many as the megaphone for the abortion lobby—the people who covers state legislation for the Guttmacher Institute—insisted. But if that inflated level of 2011 success is the measuring rod, we were almost by definition going to fall “short” in 2012.
In addition, pro-abortionists could club legislators with the threat of reprisals at the ballot box. That’s nothing new, of course, but the extent to which pro-abortionists were apparently able to bring supporters to state capitols was.
How? Two ways in particular. First, pro-abortionists are very sophisticated users of social media. As we have talked about many times in NRL News and NRL News Today, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like constitute a very effective way of communicating with large numbers of people in a very, very short period of time.
But, second, having the mechanism is one thing, having the message is another. And the message/mantra was that every pro-life initiative—even those with very broad appeal—was a part of a bogus “war on women.”
Of course requiring that a mother have the opportunity to look at the unborn child whose life she is about to end is a “war” only against those who don’t believe in informed consent. And protecting unborn babies who are capable of feeling excruciating pain during an abortion is a “war” only on cruelty and inhumanity.
But even having the tools to disseminate a distorted message could only have limited application. The accelerator, as it were, was the traditional media. Whether in print on online, their uncritical coverage of every pro-abortion distortion made it seem as if what pro-abortionists screamed bore some relationship, however passing, to the truth.
Virginia was the test case. Bus in loads of angry pro-abortionists, shout to the heavens that the ultrasounds virtually every abortionist was ALREADY using constituted ‘rape,’ and sit back to listen while newspapers and television stations parrot your libelous charges. In the end, Virginia passed its ultrasound law but not without waves of charges, as ugly as they were disingenuous, hurled against legislators.
If ever there was an illustration of the famous adage, this qualifies: “A lie can go halfway `round the world before truth gets its pants on.”
As a pro-life friend of mine once said, the truth needs to get out of bed before sunrise.
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