The Truth? Who’s Got Time?

You’ve probably heard plenty about Senator Kyl’s Policy of Truth (oops, that’s a Depeche Mode Song)…

New York (CNN) –
“Not intended to be a factual statement.”

This was the sound of the curtain coming back on what passes for political debate too often these days.
The now-infamous statement from Sen. Jon Kyl’s office was released after he said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that abortions represent “over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

It turns out that the actual number is 3%, a mere rounding error of 87%. But it was presented to the American people and enshrined in the Senate Record as a means of arguing that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded in the current budget…

But the facts are inconvenient, and so they are ignored. Instead, talking points taken from talk radio are repeated until they take on a life of their own and eventually get the validation of a U.S. senator…

In this absurd spin cycle, there’s one dependable place to look for sanity: satire. And on cue came Stephen Colbert, who took Kyl’s statement as a challenge and dialed it up to 11. Using the Twitter hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, Colbert unleashed a steady stream of Jon Kyl mistruths with the requisite denial. Among my favorites:

• Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.
• Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.
• Every Halloween Jon Kyl dresses up as a sexy Mitch Daniels.
• Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.
• Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the ’86 World Series.
• Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.
You get the idea. But the problem is much bigger than Jon Kyl. Colbert is going to have to get a bigger hashtag. Because we’re heading to a strange place where Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s truism “everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts” no longer applies.

Exhibit B this week: Donald Trump’s re-enflaming of the thoroughly discredited birther conspiracy theory. When he repeats this falsehood in interviews, he is too often treated as a man with an unorthodox opinion, not someone repeating a lie on national television.

As a result, more people are duped and the country more divided, not on the many rational reasons to oppose President Obama’s policy agenda but on paranoid fantasies cut out of whole cloth.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a man responsible for pushing the birther myth — and a reported recent Trump adviser — Joe Farah of the fringe website World Net Daily freely admitted to Salon.com this week that his site publishes “some misinformation.”

“Misinformation” is a fancy word for lying with an ideological agenda in mind. It has become more acceptable and more influential with the rise of partisan media. It preys on the gullible and the stupid and the ditto-head alike…

“Not intended to be a factual statement” is an instant dark classic, a triumph of cynicism, capturing the essence of Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe in Washington: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

We Evangelicals don’t have a great track record on recognizing facts, though, do we?  We lump premodern, poetic illustrations about the creation of the universe alongside scientific textbooks containing data on carbon dating… really?  We can’t differentiate?  We can’t differentiate between an archetypal flood narrative (by the way, shared by countless premodern societies – not unique to Judaism) and – say – plate tectonics?

We live in a world of FALSE EQUIVALENCIES. Wherein completely unequal, divergent or nonparallel things are juxtaposed, weighed and treated as if they even speak the same language.  Like modern evolutionary biology is an equivalent to Genesis 1.

It’s not honoring to Scripture to force it into modern scientific categories; it’s degrading and presumptuous.  Scripture is an entirely foreign genre, from an entirely foreign era and culture…

But I digress.  The “DATA” claptrap coming out of “birthers” and “neocons” and conservative cynics like Senator Kyl isn’t mismatched or flat wrong because it’s miscommunicated from the wrong cultural vantage.  It’s wrong because it’s intentionally deceptive, based on a misunderstood paradigm, in which bad, literalist (mis)interpretations of Genesis and Revelation (among other texts) are used as excuses to ignore and disbelieve that the sky is blue and the grass is green and the universe is OLD.  This is a concerted effort to undermine science, right and wrong, and reality itself, in the name of religious ideology… But the reasons themselves are far more insidious.  They are economic and, ultimately, plutocratic.