Oh, Those Catholic Values

This tidbit from a City Pages interview with 1st Congressional District DFL candidate Tim Walz (ironically touted as "from the cafeteria to Congress?" on the cover) caught my eye:

CP: The First District runs along the entire border of southern Minnesota and is viewed as being socially conservative. There is a reference to your "Catholic values" on your website. Are you pro-choice or pro-life on abortion?

Walz: I am pro choice, openly pro choice. And the reason for that is that if our goal is to get women true opportunities, true choice, and to reduce the number of abortions, criminalization is not the way to go. That is just based on fact. The second part is the privacy issue: me extending my values and my beliefs into somebody else's values and beliefs on something as personal as that. Guess the Catholic values thing was more the social justice thing. When I went to the CYO camps, the message always was, Don't be too big for your britches; look out for people less fortunate because it could be you. There was a real sense that we are all this together. I reference those values because I feel strongly about it.

Yeah, guess you weren't really all that serious about that whole "Catholic values thing" after all, were you? Must have been a phase you were going through.

On the abortion issue, reports show that 71 percent of women who have abortions one year later say it was strictly because of economic means. So in the Clinton years when we were having the ability to provide health care and the ability to provide daycare and food, the WIC program, and those things, the abortion numbers went way down. And in the Bush administration they have gone way up. I think there are some people who are maybe searching for a little personal salvation on this and I know they feel really strongly about it. But I say, if you really want to reduce the number of abortions you make sure there are opportunities for women and that our education system is strong.

I'm constantly amazed that no matter how times an alleged fact is refuted and proven untrue, there's always an opportunistic politician (usually a Dem) who's willing to dredge it up and give it new life. Abortions have increased under Bush, right? Wrong!

Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

This claim is false. It's based on an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of 43 states found that abortions have actually decreased. Update, May 26: The author of the original claim now concedes that the Guttmacher study is "significantly better" than his own.

Not that this will stop Walz or the next fact-challenged Democrat from making this thoroughly discredited assertion early and often between now and November.