Peter Heck is Intellectually Lazy

Is the Indy Star paying for Peter Heck’s column? Because if they are, they got ripped off by the installment in his weekly encyclical published on May 5. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Heck was in the bottom of a tequila bottle when he sent that one in. If you missed it (which you should), you can read it here (I linked to the Google cache version so you don’t put ad money in the moron’s coffers). Heck’s bio says he teaches high school history… I certainly hope he has higher standards for the research his students do than he apparently does for his column.

For starters, Heck’s piece is little more than a reword of an anti-Planned Parenthood screed that’s been making the rounds for several years, one that depends entirely on “statements” transcribed by an anti-abortion activist. Clearly, he didn’t even do original research. The main problem with his piece? even though a YouTube video of the statements makes it obvious that the event in question is a debate among college students, Heck continues to refer to a student participant as a “Planned Parenthood spokeswoman.” That’s the logical fallacy known as “conflation.”

NOTE: If you’d like to see the video, you can find a heavily-edited version of it on YouTube here, complete with captions and dramatic music. What’s missing is… well, what's missing is any context. Like the heavily edited videos attack-dog videographer James O’Keefe uses to “bust” enemies of the right, nothing that disagrees with the opinion of the video editor has been allowed to remain. Moving on, Heck claims that the students were “confronted with the biological evidence for the obvious humanity of the unborn child.” No one denies that a fetus is human genetic material – that’s science: hell, that’s what embryonic stem-cell research (which Heck also hates with a passion) is all about. What Heck and his fellow anti-abortion protesters claim is that the fetus is human because God breathed life into it at the moment of conception. Sorry, Pete, that’s not science, no matter how hard you twiddle the knobs.

All that pales alongside the utter stupidity inherent in Heck’s time-worn slippery slope argument: “A murderer is no longer a murderer if he or she simply declares that he or she doesn't believe in the humanity of the victim?”

Weak, Pete, weak – almost as weak as claiming that a debate in a student forum seven years ago has anything to do with A) the official stance of Planned Parenthood, and B) the March For Science held in April, 2017. Has anyone told you lately that you’re intellectually lazy? Well, you are.

copyright © 2017 scmrak