Let’s start here:
- Police cadets are taught they need evidence to build a case.
- Law students are taught to win cases with evidence.
- Science is evidence-based.
Conservative beliefs are not based on evidence:
- Conservatives didn’t need evidence to believe Hillary Clinton ran a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.
- Or to believe John F. Kennedy Jr. will rise from the dead and reappear in Dallas to reinstate Trump.
- Or believe Trump’s election lies (which continue to this day).
Or a host of other stupid things they believe. They believe what they want to, facts not needed.
Here’s a case in point.
Catherine Glenn Foster is the president and CEO of Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group based in Washington D.C. (profile here). Testifying before a congressional committee on Thursday, May 19, 2022, she claimed aborted fetuses are burned to generate electricity. (See story and watch video here.)
You can be forgiven for incredulity. And coming from a conservative advocate, it’s highly suspect. What’s her evidence? She didn’t offer any.
Her assertion is based on a half-truth that has gone viral in conservative circles. In Baltimore, a waste utility incinerates medical waste in a plant that generates electricity. But aborted fetuses don’t go into that waste stream or incinerator (see stories here and here). Conservative propagandists took this debunked story and spun it into a falsehood, and Foster repeated the lie in her congressional testimony.
But let’s suppose a waste company somewhere incinerates aborted fetal tissue along with other medical waste in a waste-to-energy plant. How much electricity would that generate? Probably not enough to flicker a lightbulb. There aren’t enough fetuses in the entire galaxy to keep this baby (photo below) running. Foster’s claim that city streets are lighted with burned fetuses is preposterous on its face.
Is it any wonder nobody takes conservatives seriously, except other conservatives?
