Sunday, October 31, 2004

Stassen revisited

The American Thinker has more on that Olympian theologian, that ethicist from Ephesus, that son of Dionysius the Areopagite, Glenn Stassen, Lewis B. Smedes professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California.

When we last checked in with Prof. Stassen, he was trying to persuade pro-lifers to vote for Kerry, because, he implies, Democratic social policies produce fewer abortions than Republican restrictions on such activities as tax-paid funding of abortion and the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion. What we found was that Prof. Stassen misrepresented his pro-life bona-fides, juggled preliminary figures and based his reckoning on economic statistics that didn't even have a clear correlation with abortion, much less proving causality. After researching my post, I learned that LifeNews.com reached the same conclusions (and in greater depth).

In our continuing saga, Prof. Stassen has now descended from Mount Olympus to give us deep thoughts on how war is not healthy for children and other living things. Fortunately for all of us, Jim Arlandson at The American Thinker has thoroughly fisked Prof. Stassen on this topic as well.

Being an honest partisan is an honorable pursuit: stating one's reasons for supporting a candidate, making the case, seeking to persuade. But Stassen is not an honest partisan. For one thing, he is not honest. Beyond his arguments thought, trying to hide his partisanship behind a facade of the wise theologian who looks down from above all those petty political concerns, he actually lowers himself to the level of a political hack.

I don't care if Fuller has a leftist for its ethics professor, but Michael Moore might be about equally balanced.

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