Answer to Pollak on Keenan on Abortion at Military Hospitals

      Joel Pollak does not prove that Nancy Keenan lied when she said that "Rep. Ryan's anti-choice record includes: Repeatedly voting to deny women in the military, who defend our freedom overseas, the right to use their own, private funds for abortion care at military hospitals." The reason he fails to prove that she lied is that her statement is completely true. If what you are saying is just the plain truth of the matter, no one can reasonably say that you're lying when you say it. Pollak implies that the fact that U. S. Military hospitals never provided abortions proves that Keenan's statement is a lie, but nothing Keenan said contradicts that fact. If anything, the fact that U. S. Military hospitals don't provide abortions supports Keenan's claim that U.S. servicewomen are denied the right to obtain abortions there.
      Keenan says "Rep. Ryan's anti-choice record includes: Repeatedly voting to deny women in the military, who defend our freedom overseas, the right to use their own, private funds for abortion care at military hospitals." This includes several different points that can be expressed seperately:

  1. Ryan has a record of opposing abortion rights. Thus, he has what could also be called a "pro-life" record.
  2. Ryan's record includes voting the same way several times in a row.
  3. These votes all concerned the rights of women who serve in the U.S. military.
  4. U.S. servicewomen help to defend our freedom by their sevice overseas,
  5. Each of these votes by Ryan was to _not_ allow U.S. servicewomen a certain right.
  6. That was the right to get abortions at U.S. military hospitals.
  7. But the women would have had to pay for those abortions themselves.

      To put this all together in my own words, I would say that Keenan's statement can be represented as saying that, in the past, U.S. military hospitals did not allow U.S. servicewomen to obtain abortions. Later, some people tried to change things so that U.S. servicewomen would have the right to obtain abortions, if they used their own money to pay for the procedure. They tried several times to do this, and at least some of the times they did this, Paul Ryan voted against changing things so that U.S. servicewomen would have the right to obtain abortions at their own expense.
      Keenan did not say that Military hospitals ever provided abortions. She said that Paul Ryan voted to deny servicewomen the right to obtain abortions at military hospitals. This implies that military hospitals did not provide abortions to servicewoman at the time the votes were cast because. Think about it. If military hospitals did provide abortions, then there would be no point in trying to get them to do so. Nobody ever introduces bills to give people rights that they already have, so Keenan's claim that these bills existed implies that U.S. military hospitals do not provide abortions to begin with. The word "deny" in Keenan's statement means "refuse to give," so her statement implies that Ryan voted to not give servicewomen a new right, a right that they did not already have, so Keenan is basically saying that servicewomen can't get abortions in military hosptitals, even if they used their own money, and Paul Ryan repeatedly voted to keep it that way.
       Reviewing Ryan's record, I found eight seperate occasions where congressional Democrats tried to get an amendment passed that would have allowed servicewomen to obtain, at their own expense, abortions at military hospitals. Ryan is recorded as having voted "no" absolutely every time this measure came up. Thus it is absolutely true, without any shadow of a doubt that Paul Ryan repeatedy voted to not allow women who serve in the U.S. military the right to obtain abortions, at their own expense, at U.S. military hospitals, which is exactly what Keenan said.
      Logically, Pollak's argument that Keenan lied makes absolutely no sense. I can't even see any way of mistakenly coming to the conclusion that Keenan lied. It seems obvious to me that if you're going to challenge a claim about someone's voting record, you would figure out what that claim means exactly and then look at the person's actual record and see if the claim is true, but Pollak doesn't seem to have done anything like that. He says that the fact that U.S. military hospitals do not provide abortions proves that Keenan was lying, but I really don't see how that is supposed to work. Keenan says Ryan voted against letting servicewomen get abortions at military hospitals. Pollak says that military hospitals don't provide abortions. These statements do not conflict in any way, so one of them being true would not make the other false.
         Since what Keenan said was absolutely true, and nothing that Pollak said gave us any reason to think that Keenan was wrong, Pollak doesn't even prove that Keenan was even making a mistake, far less lying. To prove that someone is lying, you have to prove that what they say is false, and that they knew, or should have known, that it was false when they said it. Pollak proves neither of these things regarding Keenan.
         At least in this instance, Keenan demonstrates the ability to get her facts straight, and to make strictly true statements. It's true that these facts may make Ryan look bad to Keenan's pro-choice readers, but they would also make him look good to any pro-life readers, and anyway, facts are facts.
         It's hard to speculate on what someone was thinking, but for reasons of charity, I should make some effort to put Pollak into the best light possible, so if there's a way to see Pollak as making an honest and understandable mistake, I should take that as representing his thinking process in this case. Looking at Keenan's original statement, it seems possible to me that he took the phrase "the right to use their own, private funds for abortion care" as specifically referring to a right to use their own money, rather than primarily referring to a right to obtain abortions. Once we focus on the possibility that Pollak fixed on the "own private funds" part of the sentence, it seems possible that Pollak thought that Keenan was saying something that could be simplified and abstracted as follows:

Rather than what I think Keenan was actually saying, which can be simplified and abstracted like so:

Looking at it this way, it's at least conceivable that Pollak made an honest mistake. And we might reasonably criticize Keenan for ambiguity for using the phrase "the right to use their own, private funds for abortion care" rather than "the right to obtain abortions at their own expense," or even just ""the right to purchase abortions," which would have made it harder to interpret her as saying that servicewomen already got free abortions at military hospitals, and that Ryan voted allowing them to pay for their abortions. But it's hard to be too critical of Keenan, because interpreting her in the way I think Pollak might have interpreted her requires us to assume that Pollak believes two very bizarre things. First, it requires Pollak to believe that Keenan is saying that the staunchly pro-life Paul Ryan is in favor of free abortions at military hospitals. Second, it requires Pollak to believe that staunchly pro-choice Keenan thinks it is a bad thing that Ryan favors these free abortions. Nether of these things makes sense in the context of what we know about Keenan and Ryan, and so, even if we see Pollak as making this particular mistake, we also have to see him as not thinking through the implications of this idea.
         The other mistake Pollak could have made, of course, is to misread the word "deny" as "take away from," which simply betrays an  inability to read simple English sentences. He also doesn't seem to know the difference between contradicting and agreeing with someone. 
         It's hard to comment on Pollak's integrity. Certainly if one were to accuse another of lying, one would at a minimum be obligated to investigate the other's claim, figure out what she meant exactly, and do the research necessary to find out whether her statement was true or false. One would also be obligated to be charitable, which means to make a serious effort to figure out the interpretation of the other's words under which they made the most sense. Pollak certainly did not spend much time trying to understand Keenan, he didn't do much in the way of research, and he was far from charitable. Still, it's hard for me to see Pollak as lying here. It's true that he made a very serious, and completely false accusation that he could very, very easily have checked out and found to be untrue, but, at least at this point, it is perfectly possible that he's simply an idiot.

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