Byrnes on Harris, Pitcher on Pitcher
Sholto Byrnes did a nice job of defending Evan Harris.
A consistently strong voice for the NHS and for science, he shared the title of “Secularist of the Year” with Lord Avebury in 2009 for their work in helping abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. He has campaigned against faith schools and argued courageously in favour of abortion, euthanasia, immigration and gay rights…I think he has been one of the most principled MPs in parliament, sticking to his convictions and standing up for a true-liberal view of free speech and of the idea of liberty itself.
The fact that some of the policies he advocates led “one Labour MP” in this peculiarly nasty Daily Mail profile to say “he’s way to the left of us”, only serves to show that Evan — or “Dr Death” as the Mail’s Leo McKinstry calls him — has not trimmed and tacked to the centre-right as New Labour did.
Well said. Under that there’s a very long and very whiny self-justifying comment by George Pitcher, claiming that he wasn’t really so terribly nasty and dishonest as all that in his Telegraph blog post. He doesn’t even mention his foul accusation that Harris “supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves,” much less take it back or claim he said it by accident. Horrible man.
Bravo to Sholto Byrnes, who, as I recall, was not kind to Does God Hate Women? Pitcher’s ad hominem attack on Evan Harris is a remarkable piece of yellow journalism, personality assasination by innuendo and misdirection. Reading it over one more time – what a painful chore! – I noticed one gratuitous insult that I had not noticed before. He speaks of Harris’s ‘tragically doomed relationship’ with a designer from Northern Ireland, Liz O’Hara. But surely it was not the relationship that was tragically doomed, since he dropped some of his responsibilities so that he could be with her ‘in her last months,’ which shows the strength of the relationship, yet Pitcher makes it seem as though it is just a continuation of an earlier failed relationship which ended in divorce. And then, of course, he segues from that straight into Harris’s new relationship with a woman from the ‘abortion industry,’ and then suggests that Harris’s support for women’s right to choose is unprincipled because of that relationship. Remarkable! And then, in his blog comment, to bring out the Christian pap about ‘I love him but don’t like him’ is almost too much even for a strong stomach.
But if you look at Pitcher’s claim about abortion rates in Europe, it is false that the abortion rate in the Ukraine is the highest in Europe (as Pitcher says in his blog post to Sholto Byrne) but it is higher than in the UK, and there are thirteen other European countries with rates higher than the UK.
There is a widespread idea that the legalisation of abortion led to a dramatic increase in abortion, but this is disputable. While there are no entirely accurate statistics regarding illegal abortions, they were much higher than many people assumed, and what was legalised, in most cases, was the status quo, though Christians continue to argue that legalisation was just a slippery slope leading to moral indifference to the seriousness of abortion.
It wasn’t so much that Byrnes was not kind about Does God Hate Women? as it was that he was so infuriated by it that he told falsehoods about it, in particular, saying that it was nothing but invective. In fact he did a Pitcher. I suspect that he has a (somewhat) bad conscience about that now. (I suspect that because of something he said on another recent New Statesman blog post.)
Yes that bit about loving him and then paltering about liking him and then shrugging and lapsing back into unadulterated malice – was truly rebarbative. He’s a revolting spectacle, Pitcher is. Pleased with himself and nasty; ugh.
Thomas Sowell has a silly column (as usual) claiming the left and “socialized” medicine want old people to die because they are in the way. The old “If we would just return to traditional values (never defined), we would all be happy” gets trotted out. He fails to mention that those traditional values would put him in chains or, at best, segregate him from the majority population.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell.html?columnsName=tso
Oh well of course, evry fule kno that Obamacare means Death Panels. That poster with Obama-as-Hitler is all the evidence anyone needs.
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