 When Political Correctness Becomes Conventional Wisdom By DOUG PATTON Published: Apr 21, 2008 Until last week, I still had hope. I still believed, perhaps naively, that the majority of Americans were wise enough to see the truth. Perhaps they are, but given the onslaught of political correctness now surrounding the topic, I seriously doubt it. I think we have lost the battle.
The issue is global warming, now cleverly called “climate change” by those who seek to explain away those pesky unseasonable drops in temperature that contradict the idea of “warming.”
The reason for my despair is two-fold. First, a page caught my eye in my latest issue of World Magazine. There on page 49 was a full-page ad for the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The most disturbing line read, “According to an Ellison Research poll, 84 percent of evangelicals support federal legislation to significantly reduce carbon emissions that cause global warming, and increasingly Christians are calling for action to protect the world God entrusted to us.”
That is a depressing statistic. If it is correct, it tells me that the vast majority of American evangelicals now believe the lies and pseudo-science being propagated by Al Gore and his minions, elitists who would have us roll back our technology by a century in the name of “going green.”
But the final straw for me was a new television commercial featuring Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, wherein the past and present Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives tell us that the one thing on which they can agree is that we are making the planet warmer and we must do something about it.
Newt Gingrich favors private sector solutions to most problems, and recent interviews he has given on the subject leave little doubt that this issue is no exception. Since there is more than ample scientific opinion in opposition to Gore and his Chicken Little crowd, it is disappointing that Newt has accepted the concept that human activity has any significant impact on the temperature of the planet.
Nevertheless, Gingrich should be shrewd enough to know that Nancy Pelosi has big government solutions in mind, and his teaming with her can do nothing but give credence to that philosophy.
By lending his name to this message, Newt Gingrich is playing right into the hands of the Left, thereby giving credibility to the idea that this is a crisis in the making, that humans are responsible for it and government has the answers. Combine his considerable political weight among conservative Christians with the Evangelical Climate Initiative's message to Christians about this issue, and you have a political disaster in the making.
Con artists like Gore have enriched themselves on this issue, taking home Oscars, Nobel Prizes and millions of dollars. Meanwhile, evangelical leaders are setting up their flocks for extreme fleecing by leftist politicos like Barack Obama, who will appeal for Christian votes by talking in glowing, biblical-sounding terms about “being good stewards of God's creation.”
Climate change scientists have no evidence for their theories that cannot be refuted by experts of equal or greater stature. Bill Gray, for example, is the world's most famous authority on hurricanes. Working in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University, he predicts the number of hurricanes each tropical storm season will produce. A towering figure in his field, he has trained dozens of scientists over the years.
Gray has testified on global warming before Congress. He has given speeches, written articles and done all he can think of to get his message out. Yet, he has been ostracized by his colleagues, cut off from government funding and invested more than $100,000 of his own money to keep his research going — all because he contends that global warming is a fraud.
“I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people,” he says. “I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damn hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing.”
Unfortunately, it appears that the yuppies have won and their political correctness has now become conventional wisdom. Welcome to the 19th Century.
Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net. |
