Lies, Lies, and More Lies

What do Abortion-On-Demand and Campaign Finance Reform have in common? Lies, lies, and more lies. Although different causes, the same "truth be damned" arrogance drove both.

As reported in the New York Sun, Sean Treglia's job while at Pew Charitable Trusts, was to "create" the "truth" for why Campaign Finance Reform was needed:

Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform. (emphasis mine)

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform." (emphasis mine)

How is this similar to the abortion issue? Read on, read on!

Dr. Bernand Nathanson, one of the original founders of NARAL who performed 75,000 abortions himself, had this to say about the foundational lies of the abortion-on-demand movement:

Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law. Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalising abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would thenbe done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalisation. (emphasis mine)

Because the decision was taken away from the law-makers and given to an un-elected judiciary, the lies were not exposed during normal debate and inquiry in the legislative branch.

I'm not saying that abortion on demand and campaign finance reform are morally equivalent. Abortions kill millions of human beings. Campaign Finance Reform has only "killed" political speech, which although it's a cherished freedom and necessary right for a democracy, it's not the same thing as a dead human being. However, I thought it noteworthy that when the truth of their positions doesn't sit well with the American public, the Left resorts to lying and manufacturing "facts". They don't attempt to persuade using the truth, but instead manipulate public opinion through well-placed lies. In both cases the American public believed the oft-repeated lie. Most likely neither abortion-on-demand nor CFR would have been enacted, if the public knew the truth.