The always excellent Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard has a remarkable piece about the corrupting influence of abortion on the left’s mindset—how elevating it to primacy status in the political arena has thoroughly distorted the thinking of otherwise smart people, forcing them to adopt positions that would be simply ludicrous if they weren’t so horrifying.
Professor Stephen Schneck is a conundrum. He’s a Catholic who works for the Catholic University of America (CUA). But he’s involved with the group Catholics for Obama—despite the church hierarchy’s view that the president is attacking the religious freedom of Catholics. He’s pro-life. But he supports Democratic politicians universally—even though the party has become manifestly hostile to pro-lifers. Schneck’s most puzzling contradiction is this: He claims that while Democrats support abortion rights, it’s really Republicans who cause abortions.
Schneck is very specific about it. He has numbers. At an event in Charlotte earlier this month during the Democratic convention, Schneck spoke on a panel hosted by Democrats for Life. He asked the audience, “Can one vote for Romney if it means a 6, or 7, or, God forbid, 8 percent increase in the number of abortions in America?”
So, as an academic, Schneck has the data to back up his predictions, right? Well, no, Last discovered. Schneck’s numbers are merely an extrapolation of his (il)logic and prejudices:
One third of deliveries are now paid for by Medicaid. So if President Romney cuts the program by 40 percent, those same people who can’t get the government to cover their kids’ births will not practice birth control. Instead, they’ll still get pregnant…and have abortions!
No wonder liberal academics feel superior to ordinary people. They infantilize them.
Read the whole article. Last uses a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer, and the effect is all the more devastating.
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I’d like to do some unicorn forecasting myself but I don’t think they give out licenses for that. Maybe I can get a degree in it though.
Democrats are the architects of their own extinction. Just compare the “family” photos of the Clintons to the Romneys.
Bill and Hillary – 1 child, no grandchildren
Mitt and Ann – 5 children, 18 (and counting) grandchildren
That pattern repeats itself all across the Democrat/Republican landscape.
Liberals have abortions.
Conservatives don’t.
40 years after Roe v. Wade, there are fewer liberals than ever.
Coincidence?
I think not…..
Well said. Furthermore, what statistics, even false ones, will NEVER CAPTURE, is the ferocious moral cost of abortion:
“Earth’s Unborn Children Weeping”
How dread that sound, the world around,
That bids us wake from sleeping.
It is the heartache of our time,
Earth’s unborn children weeping.
Why can’t we see, what should not be,
The innocents we slaughter.
They ask for little more than life.
They beg–but none will offer.
Too close to thee, too close to me,
Unspoken pleadings languish.
In selfish pride, we pass them by,
And let them die in anguish.
Oh, Precious Son, Thou Holy One,
Help us to heal their sorrows.
Teach us to give, let us so live,
That they share our tomorrows.
Then in that day, when Thou shalt say,
“I left them in thy keeping.”
Our works and words will testify,
“We heard Thy children weeping.”
No rights reserved. See Matthew 18:2-7.
Did they tear it out, with talons of steel
And give you a shot, so that you wouldn’t feel
And wash it away, as if it wasn’t real
It’s just a mistake, I won’t have to face
Don’t give it a name, don’t give it a place
Don’t give it a chance, it’s lucky in a way
It must have felt strange, to find me inside you
I hadn’t intended to stay
If you want to keep it right, put it to sleep at night
Squeeze it until it could say
You can’t be too strong you can’t be too strong
You can’t be too strong
You can’t be too strong you decide what’s wrong
Well I ain’t gonna cry, I’m gonna rejoice
And shout myself dry, and go see the boys
They’ll laugh when I say, I left it overseas
Yeah babe I know that it gets dark, down by luna park
But everybody else, is squeezing out a spark
That happened in the heat, somewhere in the dark, in the dark
The doctor gets nervous, completing the service
He’s all rubber gloves and no head
He fumbles the light switch, it’s just another minor hitch
Wishes to God he was dead
But you can’t be too strong you can’t be too strong
You can’t be too strong
You can’t be too strong
Can’t be too strong you decide what’s wrong
Can’t be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right, too wrong
And you, can’t be too strong
Baby you can’t be too strong
My favorite Graham Parker song, though it can be difficult to listen to.
They compensate through indoctrination, which is validated through promises of instant gratification without perceived consequences.
Democrats just import more liberals to make up the difference.
One third of deliveries are now paid for by Medicaid. So if President Romney cuts the program by 40 percent, those same people who can’t get the government to cover their kids’ births will not practice birth control. Instead, they’ll still get pregnant…and have abortions!
__________________
Because Obamacare will pay for their abortions, right? But guess what? If Romney is cutting Medicaid because he’s president, he’s also repealing Obamacare — so how will all those pregnant Democrats pay for all those abortions they’ll be “forced” to get if Romney cuts off their “free” Medicaid baby deliveries?
Wow, life sure can be tough when one has to be responsible for one’s own choices, and can’t rely on Big Daddy Government to step in and pay all the bills. How ever did people manage to live their lives in the days before all our “progressive” betters came along to micro-manage our lives for us?
Perhaps all those “rich” Democrats, who have just too much money for their own good, will pitch in and pay for the abortions. … and perhaps the contraceptives too.
40% of deliveries are paid for by the government? 40% can’t afford to pay for it themselves? That’s a scandal!
No. That’s “the” scandal
Quick reference to support that statistic: http://health.newamerica.net/blogposts/2011/number_of_the_day_41_of_births_covered_by_medicaid-54510
41% as of 2011
“So if President Romney cuts the program by 40 percent, those same people who can’t get the government to cover their kids’ births will not practice birth control. Instead, they’ll still get pregnant…and have abortions!”
What I am ALWAYS fascinated by is the complete disregard of a thing called “charity” in any of the Collectivists’ thinking.
This is curious, since the American people have a bright history of being the most generous people on earth or in history. We have formed dozens of organizations to give that effect.
Many of them have withered, because (as Mark Steyn says), “As government gets bigger, everything else gets smaller”.
Shrink government, and watch the charity of Americans swell to meet needs.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. — JFK, Friday, January 20, 1961
It’s just so “early 60’s” and then only people who believed in tax cuts thought such things
Not only is it shocking to think someone with supposedly strongly held Catholic beliefs is willing to reduce abortion down to dollars and cents, but it is almost unbelievable that the same person offers NO OTHER ALTERNATIVE to an unwanted pregnancy or an abortion. It’s as if the church and Christianity are perhaps only a convenience for academic position. (Sound familiar??)
In other words, for his analysis to be robust, he must not be thinking of any activity except abortion. And only then can he extrapolate using his ‘assumptions’ (my words) to an increase based on finances. If you were to include any other real world factors, such as birth control, adoption (reimbursed births as well), or even raising the child, the results would be different.
Single dimension (single factor) academics are getting trite and boring. Especially when they are supposedly addressing real world, social issues which are as far from single dimension as you can get. It’s drivel. Perhaps sponsored by federal dollars, but the results are drivel in the end.
It doesn’t require a physician to give birth. It requires a physician to have an abortion.
There are no pro life dems. They’ve all been compromised or corrupted. I give you Stupak , Casey. Shamed frauds & liars.
Thanks to crazy professors like Schneck, Catholic University of America is yet another university I’ll be adding to my list of colleges we won’t be considering for my kids. It’s sad to see that there are Catholics who will bend themselves into moral pretzels in order to support the immoral policies of Obama and the left. Apparently many Catholics have been deceived into thinking that “social justice” (government-supported stealing and envy) is more important than stopping the government-supported mass killing of unborn babies.
Hmmm… Speaking as as alum of the grad program in Politics from CUA, I have to say this attitude is shortsighted. Yes, Prof. Schneck is talking out of his hat here, and, yes, I too wish Dr. Schneck was faithful to the moral principles of the Catholic faith – the single minded subservience to Democratic political success is particularly cringeworthy… but, Dr Schneck is not the entire Politics department, only a part of it. Actually, part of the problem is that Dr. Schneck is not trained as a social scientists. He is a theorist. (His research fields are listed as Contemporary continental political theory, continental philosophy, German and French critical theory…not a lot of stats there.)
That being said, there are real Conservative voices in the CUA Politics Department, and there are not a whole lot of places in higher ed that can say that. Any right leaning person could learn a lot from people like David Walsh, Claes Ryn or Dennis Coyle, as could any left leaning person with an open mind.
That being said, it is also incumbent upon Conservatives to not close their minds. It is too easy to think “Well, I’m surrounded by lefties all the time, therefore there is nothing they could offer that I haven’t heard before.” This is lazy thinking and should be avoided. I learned much from Dr. Schneck (in his excellent Nietzsche seminar for example),and I certainly would hate for Catholic University to become a monoculture, even one I largely agree with.
I wouldn’t want to learn from a professor who indulges in lazy thinking, as Schneck does in the article quoted. He uses no data for his assertions. As a consumer, I definitely judge a university’s product and reputation based on the professors who teach there. Also considering that we are already steeped in liberal culture from birth onward, many consumers would welcome a university that teaches what it claims to teach, especially if they are paying large tuition bills for the privilege.
Well, it sounds as if you are judging an entire University based upon Schneck’s bad performance here. I believe this is in error for two reason, A) It is a logical fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of composition, and B) CUA is one of the few places in academia that has strong conservative voices in its faculty. The fact that these voices reside not just in a Business or Law School makes it even rarer.
I get it that you’re devoted to your graduate alma mater and want to defend it. I’m just saying that as a consumer, I use various criteria to judge the product that I’m paying for. Professor Schneck is just one variable of many. CUA has fallen a bit in my rankings due to his illogical reasoning which the university seems to allow. Other universities do censure or reign in errant professors, especially when they represent the universities. Case in point: Larry Summers was famously and publicly censured by Harvard when he uttered those famous words about women and math. And I’m sure that Harvard’s reputation was one reason Harvard decided to publicly denounce Summer’s words.
BTW, Schneck is not just an associate professor but the Director of CUA’s Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. Furthermore he’s a board member of the leftist Soros-funded anti-Catholic “Catholic Alliance for the Common Good.”
His appointment as Director of the Institute by CUA means that he has more influence than other more CUA conservative professors over the curriculum. This means that any conservative Catholic would probably not choose to send their kids to this school, knowing this additional information.
Actually, his appointment to the Institute would ensure that he has less influence over things like curriculum, not more. Indeed, the University took steps to limit the Institute (kicking them out of their building, cutting their University funding, etc.) after they became an organ of Democratic party advocacy. The power struggle between the Institute and the University played out in the pages of the National Catholic Reporter at the time. Schneck and company lost that battle, which may go some way to explain his present bitterness.
CUA has often defended its Catholic-ness (as in the well publicized case of Charles Curran). I see nothing that indicates that has changed in the slightest. Indeed, I must add that in my personal dealings with Prof. Schneck, in the classroom and in his capacity as the Director of Grad Studies for the Politics Department at the time, he was scrupulously fair. I’ve known crazed ideologues in the classroom who used it as a kind of bully pulpit, and Schneck wasn’t one of them.
Like you, I find Prof. Schneck to be spectacularly wrong here. I simply caution using Schneck to generalize about the UNiversity as a whole.
Below is an article (and quotes) from Accuracy in Media that supports my conclusion that CUA is not as conservative as you claim, and that Schneck has played a role in its liberal activism.
Schneck was placed in his current position of influence in 2005 by the CUA powers-that-be. He’s still there and hasn’t been removed, so it’s apparent that the higher-ups condone what he’s doing. And lately he’s been a mouthpiece for the Soros-funded anti-Catholic CACG group.
Here’s what Schneck has been busy doing, as of May 2011:
“In addition to helping organize the protest against Boehner, Schneck recently hosted two socialists on the CUA campus at a one-sided forum on how and why the Catholic Church should be promoting liberal and pro-union social policies.
“The focus of the anti-Boehner article by Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein is the letter that she notes was “organized by faculty at Catholic University, the national university of the Catholic Church in Northeast Washington.” She adds, “Of the nearly 80 signers, about 30 are from Catholic University, including faculty from the schools of law, nursing, history and theology, among others.”
“What this means, of course, is that CUA has become a hotbed of liberal social activism designed to benefit the national Democratic Party.
“…Hiding behind the mantle of being an academic and a professor, Schneck, director of CUA’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies (IPR), makes no secret of his anti-conservative views on many social issues. He was the host of a recent CUA event featuring socialist John Sweeney, former President of the AFL-CIO, who argued that Jesus Christ was pro-union.
“Another speaker at Schneck’s conference, attended by representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, a vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America who offered his mentor, socialist Michael Harrington, a Catholic-turned-atheist, as an example for others to follow.”
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/soros-group-behind-attack-on-boehner%E2%80%99s-catholicism/
Yes, the Boehner thing was bad. It certainly showed no commitment to the idea of academic freedom.
On the other hand, *I* certainly wouldn’t ban (or protest) pro-union speakers or socialists speakers on any college campus, for the very same reason: academic freedom. (I am a very proud supporter of FIRE.)
And 30 profs signed the Boehner thing? Well, let’s see…they have around 700 academic faculty there, so that would mean roughly 4 to 4.5% of the faculty supported the measure enough to sign it. Color me unimpressed.
Anyway, I’m not convinced Conservatism needs a hothouse enviornment to thrive. Ceeding the entire rest of Catholic education so student to attend a “pure” school (someplace like Ave Maria I suppose) does not strike me as a particularly good idea.
The best way to deal with Schneck’s (and Soros’) foolishness is to shine light on it and debate it. As Last’s piece demonstrated to a “T”, that isn’t something they are well prepared to do.
Who’s against free speech and bringing various speakers to campus? That’s not what I’m debating here. I’m against “catholic” universities that claim to be catholic but are really similar to other liberal universities that push their liberal orthodoxies, then charge me $50K/year to add insult to injury. That’s false advertising. And as consumers we do have freedom of choice. So you may not want a “pure” (aka traditional) college but I do, and if I’m paying for it (especially $50K/year), it’s my choice. And I can base the choice on who runs the Institute and what his beliefs are as one variable in my decision.
As a commenter said above, it’s no wonder that Catholics leave the church for Protestantism. We are Catholic but my kids are currently going to a Lutheran private school precisely because it is overall more traditionally conservative than the Catholic schools. When my kids go to college, the same principles for choosing a university will apply.
Instapundit has been pointing out that there is a higher education bubble. People are evaluating what they’re getting for the $100K-$200K debt at many universities and will start opting for other choices, and will carefully scrutinize their options. Universities will necessarily have to start offering what consumers want if they want to attract students.
That’s fine if you want to support CUA this passionately. As for me? I’ll pass.
MadCon, I’d say you have me beat on passion by a large margin. I’ve offered no defense of Schneck other than pointing out I personally never witnessed him bringing his looniness or Democratic advocacy into the classroom.
And when you brought up the “he brought socialists onto campus” like it was some sort of smoking gun, it was not unreasonable for me to read that as your saying that was unacceptable at a Catholic university. Schneck has been there for 20 years, how would you (or I) know how many Conservative speakers he had brought to campus over all that time? Claes Ryn is a member of that faculty and he is the most paleo of paleo-conservatives you will ever find. He also brought Eugene McCarthy to campus to speak to our class. Using that information should we write him off as a raging liberal?
Now, when it comes to the cost of education and whatnot, well, yes, those are important and legitimate issues…which also have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I too am dismayed when I see half-assed versions of Catholicism passed off as the real thing. All I’m saying is that in my five years at the place that was definitely the minority opinion, and not the prevailing spirit of the place. As with all thing your mileage my vary.
I still remain deeply skeptical that places like Ave Maria are the way to go.
Rhorton, I think this whole debate started when I said that, based on Schneck’s illogical public statements, I wouldn’t choose CUA for my kids. Then you said I was wrongly judging the entire university based on one guy. And I pointed out that the beliefs of this one guy in a position of authority do make a difference, especially in a so-called catholic university. And blah blah blah.
When all is said and done, why do you care that I deem CUA as a place that I don’t want my kids to attend? Does it really matter if I use any reason I want to make that decision? Now, if other people want to send their kids there at $50K/year, that’s fine with me. I don’t care.
So let’s please call it a day. Thank you and have a good day.
And all I’m saying is I think you are using an impossible standard for a heterogeneous world.
Best of luck to you and your kids.
Here’s the money line for me: “The scandal of Stephen Schneck is really about Catholic University. Because the head of the public policy research unit at the church’s flagship university is hawking to the public a model based on no data and no research.”
Leaving aside the academic dishonesty and the perversion of “publish or perish” (or simply perversion), this is what happens when the liberal-Father-Pfleger-social-justice wing of the church runs amok. I think the reason for this dishonesty is that they are so very concerned about the ‘social justice’ aspect of not “cutting” any government social program (because after all, the government should be in charge of charity, not the church, don’t cha know) they’ll lie through their teeth to maintain the status quo.
And they wonder why Catholics leave the church for evangelical Protestant denominations; and they cannot fathom why conservative seminaries are bursting at the seams.
40 days for life begins this Wednesday. If you are pro-life and have a spare hour to stand up for life, show up and give others courage to cope with a crisis pregnancy.
http://www.40daysforlife.com/
People notice 40 days for life and some people are alive because of it.
I’d be more open to Schneck’s concern over a potential increase in the number of abortions if he had ever demonstrated any actual concern over the number that already occur every year.
Perhaps if he had taken any direct steps towards reducing or eliminating those, then I might lend him some credence.
Maybe by actually opposing politicians who are openly in favor of on demand abortion.
The Church shows great tolerance for those with doctrinal issues, the left most certainly does not, and clearly Schenck knows this and chooses to behave accordingly.
Joel, Good article.
I just found out that Mr. Schneck is a board member of the leftist Soros-funded anti-Catholic propaganda group “Catholic Alliance for the Common Good.” This tells me everything I need to know as to Mr. Schneck’s motives and agenda for saying such bizarre statements.
P.S. Here is evidence that Mr. Schneck of CUA is shamefully parroting the talking points of the Soros group “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.”
http://catholickey.blogspot.com/2008/09/cardinal-george-slams-common-good-fraud.html
“Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is an organization whose purpose is convincing Catholics to vote for pro-choice Democrats. The sleight of hand they employ in this task is to claim that such candidates align so well across the board with Catholic teaching on the common good, that their support for legalized abortion can be fairly overlooked.”