Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  For liberals, not making moral judgments is the very essence of science. On that theory, Howard Stern should be curing cancer and inventing cold fusion any day now. To great acclaim, Koop went around saying things like “I’m not here to make moral judgments. I’m here to save people if I can.” But of course Koop was making moral judgments. As he courageously told Dowd, “I hate injustice of any kind” (and let the chips fall where they may!). Warming to his subject, Koop continued, more bravely, “and I don’t like to see people excoriated in the midst of illness because there’s some other part of their life style that people don’t like.” Koop made the personal decision to withhold true information from gays rather than let them feel stigmatized.

  That is what’s known as “a moral judgment.” Still Koop blathered on and on about his heroism in excluding “morals”—meaning moral codes that have been around for thousands of years in contradistinction to morals about not stigmatizing people because of their “lifestyle,” which were invented in 1970. So a lot of gay guys were going to die needlessly, but dead or alive, they’d all feel good about their “lifestyle” choices. Because liberals shared Koop’s moral values, they praised him for lying about science and denounced his detractors as anti-science.

  A year later, Koop admitted under oath in congressional hearings that only about 4 percent of adult AIDS transmissions worldwide could be traced to heterosexual contact, and that in the United States only 2.3 percent of AIDS cases came from heterosexual contact, and “most of that is in sexual partners of IV drug abusers.” In other words, the entire, years-long AIDS Threatens Straight People Too PR campaign was a total lie from start to finish.

  At the end of the year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control were back at it, unveiling a major AIDS awareness ad campaign in which—according to one perplexed reporter asking questions at the press conference—”All the ads pertain[ed] to heterosexual behavior.”

  Koop’s campaign had its intended effect. (And not just because his freakish appearance discouraged heterosexual relations in general.) First and most important, the Washington Post hailed him as “that rarest of Washington officials—a rugged individualist who follows his own agenda, not a predictable ideologue who espouses the party line.” This tripe about rugged individualism was, of course, immediately parroted by every other major media outlet.

  Second: Everyone was terrified of contracting AIDS. AIDS hot-lines were ringing off the hook, mostly with calls from heterosexuals. In San Diego, Mothers Against AIDS—working tirelessly to counter the lies being put out by Mothers for AIDS—organized a demonstration around Mother’s Day to encourage women and their families to take AIDS tests in order to “destigmatize” AIDS tests, according to Teddie Pincus, one of the organizers. Yes, there’s nothing like a traditional Mother’s Day complete with hysterical housewives lecturing one another on the dangers of anal sex.

  Let’s be clear on what happened here: HHS, the CDC, and the surgeon general’s office, with the full cooperation of the media, deliberately put millions of lives needlessly at risk by disseminating misinformation on AIDS rather than risk stigmatizing a single gay person, however slightly. And when parents objected to their schoolchildren being taught about anal sex, Koop said they were uncomfortable with “science.”

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  IF SCIENCE must be suppressed to ensure that gays don’t feel singled out, there is no limit to the book burning that must be undertaken to avoid upsetting the ladies. At a January 2005 conference on women in the sciences, then-Harvard president Larry Summers commented that men and women might have different innate abilities in math and science, which led to fainting spells by women in attendance and raised questions about a whole different set of innate differences. In a perfect world, the women’s histrionics would have triggered a discussion on women and irony.

  Summers began his rather tepid remarks by saying he intended to be “controversial” and “to provoke you.” He even laid it on thick about “passive discrimination” against women, which—according tohim—no one can deny. But then Summers said, “[I]n the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude.”

  That was the phrase that kicked off the trial of Galileo. The effect was roughly that of telling a room full of gay men that Judy Garland couldn’t sing worth a damn. It turns out that innate intelligence differences between the sexes is a topic that may not be discussed on university campuses for fear of giving distaff professors the vapors. Summers ran “continuing discrimination” around the block again, concluding that he “would like nothing better than to be proved wrong.” But it was too late. There weren’t enough fainting couches in the room to deal with the response from nauseated female professors forced to contemplate the possibility of innate differences in ability between men and women.

  Some of the women paired off and went to the ladies’ room to discuss possible responses. Others went on eating binges. Most chose to just sit there sobbing. A quick show of hands revealed that every woman in attendance needed a hug.

  The Best in Show award went to MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who told the Washington Post, “I felt I was going to be sick.” She continued, “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.” (Some might describe Hopkins’s response to Summers’s remarks as “womanish.”) Hopkins told the Boston Globe she had to flee the room because otherwise she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up,” proving that you can become a full professor of biology at MIT without realizing that women and men are innately different. Can anyone imagine evangelicals behaving this way if someone mentioned evolution? Would they flee a room crying if Dr. Koop showed them talking condoms? Only the feminists can behave like children with so little reflection.

  A few days later, Professor Hopkins explained her emotional reaction to Summers’s remarks on NBC’s Today show, saying she was shocked by what he said because “there is research now that shows very clearly that there is unconscious bias in how we make judgments, and this unconscious bias can really influence our decisions in ways we are not aware of.” (She also did a cooking segment with Katie Couric on that same show. I guess some gender stereotypes die harder than others.) So in the case of evaluating women’s mathematical abilities, liberals’ idea of “science” consists of invisible forces that we “are not aware of,” but if anyone denies them, liberal women will run from the room, threatening to throw up.

  In strict accordance with the scientific method, a Wiccan ritual expelling Summers’s remarks had to be performed—rounds of protests, letter writing, marches, apologies, concluding with a “no-confidence” vote on Summers from the Harvard faculty. Written summaries of Summers’s noxious remarks were burned in every room like bundles of sage to cleanse the air of negative vibes.

  If Summers’s milquetoast remarks caused fainting and nausea in the ladies, they should hear what I think about women’s genetic endowments! They’d have me burned at the stake—if Cambridge weren’t a “smoke-free zone.”

  These delicate hothouse flowers have a completely neurotic response to something someone else says—and then act like it’s Summers’s fault. Only a woman could shift the blame this way. If I hit you with a sledgehammer, that is my fault. But if I propose a scientific idea and you vomit, I think that’s really more your fault. Perhaps to improve girls’ scores on the SATs, a section on blame shifting should be added to the math section.

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  WHAT liberals mean by science is never what a normal person would understand the term to convey—facts, subject to independent verification, capable of being disproved, and not alterable by crying jags. They mean banning alar and DDT, or teaching kindergartners about anal sex, or Connie Chung interviewing women who believe their breast implants made them sick. Or they mean former senator John Edwards pretending that unborn children were speaking through him in order to coax large monetary awards from juries.

  Using junk sc
ience, trial lawyer Edwards engaged in paranormal conversations with the dead to convince jurors that obstetricians—rich obstetricians with big insurance plans—caused cerebral palsy in babies by not performing cesarean sections soon enough.

  As part of his scientific case, Edwards literally claimed to channel the unborn child in front of juries. “She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now—I didn’t plan to talk about this—right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.” Edwards—or as he’s known in the courtroom, the Fetus Whisperer—continued, “She said at 3, Ì’m fine.’ She said at 4, Ì’m having a little trouble, but I’m doing OK.’ Five, she said, Ì’m having problems.’ At 5:30, she said, Ì need out.’ (Oddly enough, the little critter didn’t add, “And by the way, I’m prolife,” which I think would have been prudent under the circumstances.) In the years since Edwards told juries he could “feel” the unborn babies “inside” him, winning fabulous jury awards—and attorney’s fees for himself—it has been quietly admitted that there is no connection between cerebral palsy and the method of delivery.

  As the New York Times reported in 2004, “Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins.” During the 2004 presidential campaign, in which Edwards was the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, a Johns Hopkins neurology professor wrote to the Washington Post to say “we now know” that the science on which Edwards’s jury awards were based was false and that most “cerebral palsy is due to developmental abnormalities occurring during pregnancy or due to subtle infection near the time of delivery.” This is another way of saying that the Democrats’ 2004 VP candidate was a proven huckster whose $50 million personal fortune of ill-gotten gain was amassed by defrauding doctors, jurors, and insurance companies. And yet the Johns Hopkins professor—channeling Zippy the Chimp—said he supported the Kerry-Edwards ticket anyway.

  As a result of such lawsuits, there are now more than four times as many cesarean sections as there were in 1970. But curiously, there has been no reduction in babies born with cerebral palsy. All those cesareans have, however, increased the mother’s risk of death, hemorrhage, infection, pulmonary embolism, and Mendelson’s syndrome, while also driving up the cost of medical care for every man, woman, and child in America. Not only that, but those “little guys” John Edwards claimed to represent are having a lot more trouble finding doctors to deliver their babies. Insurance companies are getting out of the medical malpractice business and doctors are getting out of the obstetrics business rather than pay malpractice insurance in excess of $100,000 a year. All that for a paranormal lounge act just slightly more believable than Johnny Carson’s mentalist character Carnac the Magnificent.

  Then there was the liberal “science” that bankrupted the company Dow Corning. This time, liberals relied on the research not of serious scientific experts like trial lawyers, but of CBS News anchorwoman and noted biochemistry authority Connie Chung. In 1990, Chung hosted a sensationalistic report on the danger of breast implants, warning that, for some women, “It may be too late.”

  Pursuing the rigorous fact-checking methods that have made CBS News what it is today, Chung’s report consisted of interviews with three women who were “convinced” their breast implants had caused health problems. Apart from fatigue, which they each had, their symptoms were completely different. One woman had “flulike symptoms—swollen glands, fevers, chills, sweats, sore throats.” Based on her indications, my theory is this woman had the flu. I’m not a medical doctor, but then again neither is Connie Chung. Another woman suffered constant pain. The third had mouth ulcers, hair loss, skin rashes, and fevers. As Chung summarized the evidence, “There are no statistics on how many women have become ill because of their implants”—making it one of countless imaginary illnesses for which there are also no statistics. There are no statistics on how many women have become ill from watching Connie Chung. The fact that I frequently experience nausea while watching Connie Chung on TV is “anecdotal,” not “statistical,” evidence.

  It was the perfect David and Goliath story for the media: Erin Brockovich and Halliburton all rolled into one. CBS was so pleased with the program, it ran it again in November 1991, with Chung smugly remarking that her implant special program had “unleashed a torrent of protests and investigations around the country”—mostly by disgruntled topless dancers and their despondent customers. Even so, everybody has a right to be heard.

  The next year, in 1992, FDA Commissioner David Kessler banned silicone breast implants—not because the FDA had found anything wrong with silicone in the body but because women were hysterical. Kessler was too busy taping up “No Smoking” signs all over Washington to bother reviewing the medical literature, so he appointed a panel to review implant safety, and the panel advised keeping them on the market. He told them to think it over some more. They did, and again advised keeping them on the market. But Kessler was a pediatrician, and if a baby doctor doesn’t know about something used exclusively by adult women, who does? Dr. Connie Chung said breast implants were dangerous, so there had to be a moratorium.

  After Kessler’s moratorium, the trickle of lawsuits against implant manufacturers became a deluge. Within three years, Dow Corning was in bankruptcy proceedings. By then, more than twenty epidemiological studies had been performed on silicone breast implants, all of which showed no connection between implants and disease. But juries continued to give plaintiffs massive awards, eventually totaling more than $7 billion—more than one-third of which went to the trial lawyers. Like the implants themselves, the settlements were so large that one began to wonder just how large they could get before they started to look ridiculous.

  Finally, federal judges became concerned the courts were becoming accessories to a scam. They convened a panel of scientists to examine the science behind the breast implant litigation. In December 1998, after two years of reviewing all the literature on silicone implants, testimony from the parties’ experts, and the advice of their own experts, the panel concluded there was no connection between breast implants and disease.

  Where does Dow Corning go to get its money back? Why are trial lawyers allowed to say, “Too late!” Car manufacturers can’t say, “Sorry! The defective product we were wrong about is already out there. Can’t take it back now.” In the case of breast implants, liberal “science” consisted of sensational news reports on CBS’s Face to Face with Connie Chung.

  Alar was a perfectly safe substance that had been used on apples since 1968 to both ripen and preserve them. It made fresh fruit more affordable and available by allowing fruit pickers to make one sweep through the apple grove to pick the apples and then distribute them with less risk of spoilage. Because of a lunatic scare ginned up by a phalanx of Hollywood actresses like Meryl Streep, the EPA banned alar, and poor people went back to eating Twinkies instead of healthy fresh fruit. The tests that persuaded the EPA bureaucrats and Hollywood actresses that alar might cause cancer in humans involved feeding so much alar to rats—tens of thousands times more than what a human would eat—that most of the rats died of poisoning, not tumors. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization advised against a ban on alar, and Europeans continued to eat alar-preserved fruit in their nice warm houses powered by nuclear energy.

  Shortly after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina—to date this, it was around the time liberals were accusing blacks in New Orleans of engaging in cannibalism—Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote a column claiming “global warming” caused the hurricane. The only human malady RFK Jr. hasn’t blamed on global warming is Mary Jo Kopechne’s death.

  Even “global warming” devotees at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said there is variation in hurricanes from decade to decade, “with no significant trends over the twentieth century evident.” RFK’s theory might have gotten more traction but for the sudden groundswell of support for the theory that George Bush caused the hurricane.

  A
sparrow does not a spring make, but in the Druid religion of environmentalism, every warm summer’s breeze prompts apocalyptic demands for a ban on aerosol spray and plastic bags. In 1998, President Clinton denounced Republicans for opposing his environmental policies, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions of car-bon dioxide. This, after the Senate rejected the Kyoto agreement by the slender margin of 95–0. In fact, all the world’s major industrial powers initially rejected the treaty, including Japan. That’s right: even Kyoto rejected Kyoto. But soon, some countries began to realize that they could sign Kyoto while being exempt from having to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, such as China and India, two of the world’s biggest polluters. Others signed it and then proceeded to increase their greenhouse emissions, like Canada. By 2005, Canada was producing 24 percent more carbon monoxide than it had in 1990, whereas the United States was producing only 13 percent more.

  But Clinton urged immediate action on global warming. As proof that urgent action was needed, he cited Florida’s inordinately warm weather in a single month: “June was the hottest month they had ever had—hotter than any July or August they had ever had.”

  Yes, and then November–December 2000 were the two coldest months in U.S. history.

  It’s a big country; it’s always the “coldest” or “hottest” someplace.

  Adding to the world’s supply of hot air, Laurie David, “Environmental Activist” and—more relevantly—wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David, said at the end of 2005, “We just came through a September which was the hottest month since records were taken.” Except in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Aberdeen’s hottest days were in July 1936, when the temperature hit 115 degrees on two days. Ottawa still hasn’t matched the record of 1955, its hottest summer ever. January 1977 was Ohio’s coldest month ever.