Fake News

"Fake news" is a term we've been hearing a lot the last few years but it is nothing new. Consider this story.

An article published in 1917 claimed that when bathtubs first came to the United States in 1843, they created a bitter controversy: Some people found them too decadent, others too unhealthy. Cities tried to ban bathing. It took President Millard Fillmore installing a bathtub in the White House for them to become widely accepted.

The article, written by journalist H.L. Mencken, was fascinating. It was also completely false. Mencken had made the whole thing up, partly for entertainment during the bleak days of World War I, but also to make a point about how quickly a lie can become conventional wisdom.

That's a lesson that still feels relevant 102 years later. And it shows that false "facts" went viral, and news stories were aggregated and passed along, long before Twitter, or chain emails, or the internet, or even the concept of a virus itself. 

Here are a few of the "facts" Mencken wrote about the history of the bathtub:

• A British aristocrat, Lord John Russell, had invented the bathtub in 1828, but by 1835 was said to be "the only man in England" who bathed every day.
• The first American bathtub was installed on December 20, 1842, in Cincinnati. It was lined with lead and weighed 1,750 pounds.
• Bathtubs, after their introduction, became very controversial — pundits held either they were an undemocratic invention, or an unhealthy one.
• Philadelphia and Boston both tried to outlaw bathing based on health concerns. But Mencken argued that the real reason was based on income inequality: Rich could afford bathtubs, and so the poor were inherently suspicious of them.
• Eventually, President Millard Fillmore became a devotee of bathing and installed a bathtub at the White House. This stirred up the whole controversy over again: "Opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries."

Long before the internet made aggregation commonplace, it was common practice for newspapers to reprint each other's articles. And just like today, virality built on itself. Stories that proved popular continued to be reprinted because they were popular. 

And so Mencken's story started to spread, accepted as if it were true. First it appeared in other newspapers, then in medical journals; eventually the "facts" that he invented were cited on the floor of Congress.

Eight years after the initial article was published, Mencken confessed he'd made the whole thing up. "All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub, printed on Dec. 28, 1917, was pure buncombe," he wrote. "If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer, is bunk."

Mencken was making a point not just about silly rumors or satirical jokes, but about history itself, and how quickly a statement goes from word of mouth to conventional wisdom.

"For years past American historians have been investigating the orthodox legends. Almost all of them turn out to be blowsy nonsense. Yet they remain in the school history books and every effort to get them out causes a dreadful row, and those who make it are accused of all sorts of treasons and spoils," he wrote. "The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes."

Nothing proves that more conclusively than the bathtub story. Despite Mencken's disavowal of it, it continued to circulate for decades. In 2001, the Washington Post was still repeating the myth, which it had to retract.

Murder of the Innocents

Joshua Feuerstein, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, gave this courageous and profound speech on the Senate floor. May his voice spread across the nation and God touch the hearts of all who hear so this murder of innocents will stop. 

I would like to speak about a subject that is very very difficult for me to speak about. Quite frankly, difficult for a lot of Americans to talk about or hear about. It connects to all of us in extremely personal ways. Let me set some context.

Not long ago a group of animal rights activists gathered around a research facility that was using animals for their testing. The activists gathered around the facility and chanted and had signs that they held up saying "It's not science it's violence."  And other signs that said, "Animal lives are their right, we have just begun to fight" as they protested to protect the lives of the animals that were being used in that facility for research.

I understand their frustration there but let me put it in the context of some things that came out this week. We understand that this week and organization called Planned Parenthood is using children that are aborted and sending the bodies of those aborted children to research facilities sometimes for sale (different body parts) to be used in research. These are not mice; these are not lab rats. These are children; children that have gone through the horrific process of abortion.

This morning in an appropriations hearing the President and I both were in we had an extensive conversation about the rights of Oracle whales. And this protracted conversation went on and on that many people also were connected to about the rights of Oracle whales and the care for them. And then we had a protracted conversation about horse slaughter and how horses would be humanely put down. 

But in the middle of all that conversation happening today, there were still children being aborted with an instrument reaching into a mother, tearing apart a child, but carefully protecting certain organs because those organs would be valuable to sell. 

Now the challenge we have on this as a nation is, the argument is for that baby that it is really not a baby. It's just a fetus, it's tissue. It's not a human baby is what everyone is told. That's just tissue and it's up to the mom to determine what happens to that tissue. And then on the flip side of it, moments later they take that tissue and sell it because it's human organs that are needed for research. You can't say in one moment "that's not a human" and then sell it for the next moment as a human organ and say now suddenly it is. It was a human all the way through. There was never a time that wasn't a child. There was never a time that wasn't a human. And it seems to me the ultimate irony that we spend time talking about humane treatment of animals being put down, like in horse slaughter, and we completely miss children being ripped apart in the womb and their body parts being sold. 

So here's how it happens. A mom comes into a facility, gives consent to have an abortion and makes that request. After that request is made, to some moms (and we don't know exactly how they choose) to some moms they then ask for consent for their child after it's aborted to be used for research purposes. From the video that was put out this week they said that was actually comforting to some moms that they would know how traumatic the abortion is, that at least some good would come out of it, that body parts would be used for research to hopefully save other children. Which again comes back to that ultimate irony that we would literally tear one child apart in an abortion with the assumption that it would hopefully help some other child in the future, missing out on the significance of the child that's right there that could be helped by protecting their life. 

And then the doctor on this particular video gives the details how once they get that consent from the mom they would be careful to reach in and actually crush the head of the child to kill the child in the womb so they could conserve the rest of the organs; because the kidney has value, the liver has value, the lungs have value, the muscles in the legs have value. I would tell you that child has value. 

Every single adult that can hear me right now was once twenty weeks old in the womb. And we can look at each other and understand the difference between that child in the womb and any of us now is time. That's a human being we're talking about. And it doesn't give me comfort to think that one child is torn apart so they can do research on the child's organs and in some future time help a different child.

Change of Life

We were just talking about how different the neighborhood is today than it was years ago. Leroy's family moved to Berks County in 1953. There were very few Mennonites living in this part of the county back then. Today there are Mennonites of all kinds around us and within the last two years we have even seen Amish buggies going by once in awhile.

We built this house in 1968 and there have been a lot of changes inside these four walls as well. When we moved in we had very little furniture. The kitchen had only the table and chairs, a sewing machine, and a cart where I kept small appliances. The living room had a sofa and chair, coffee table and two end tables, desk, a rocking chair, and a small table with the record player on it. I hung a couple calendars on the wall and a set of paint-by-number pictures I had done. And that was the extent of the decorating. I didn't even consider spending money to decorate. We had a $114 per month mortgage to pay!

Our bedroom had the three-piece bedroom suite I bought when I was fourteen and the baby crib. We never had a nursery. I didn't want to have to trot to another room to tend the baby at night. I could jump up, stick in the pacifier, and hop back in bed. The vanity in the bathroom was the dressing table. Cloth diapers were kept in one of the drawers and changed on the top of the vanity. That worked for all six of our children for eighteen years.
We had no credit card the first five years we were married. Then we went on a trip, had trouble with the car, and came home in a snowstorm with three little children and two dollars in our pocket. We had to keep going because we didn't have enough money for a motel. The Lord took pity on us and sent a snowplow to clear the road ahead of us. We just so made it home. After that we got a credit card to use in case of emergencies during travel.

The way I cook has also changed.  We grew most of our food in the garden and got raw milk from his parents' farm. We didn't eat many pasta dishes because pastas were bought. We ate potatoes every day because we could grow them. I remember sometime in the 1970s I made lasanga and that was something new to us. Everything was cooked on the stove as I didn't have a crockpot or microwave. I'm not sure when I got  a crockpot but the microwave came in 1986 when our oldest son bought one for us. 

I sewed dresses for myself and our daughter, shirts for the boys, and curtains for the windows. There were no such things as yard sales. I went to a couple second-hand shops in the city of Reading to get coats and other things for the children or they wore hand-me-downs from their cousins or older siblings.

We had one phone in the house, hard-wired to the wall. It was a rotary phone on a party line. We never even suspected we might have a cell phone and computer someday. That was beyond our imagination. The first computer I got in 1990 was a used one and cost almost as much as I would have to spend for one today that does a whole lot more than that one did. But it was a step up from the typewriter I had been using to write Sunday school lessons. 

Our camera was an Instamatic with a flash cube. Understand that language? Leroy gave it to me for Christmas when we were dating. It was, of course, a film camera. Color pictures were just starting to replace black and white but we didn't take a lot of color pictures because they cost more. In fact, we didn't take many pictures. I wish we had taken more when we were building the house. 

Things have certainly changed and accumulated in the process of living in this house for fifty years. We had one three-month old son when we moved in and added five more children who have now moved on to establish their own homes. The house that was once noisy and cluttered is now quiet and the the whole upstairs is empty unless company comes. But it is full of good memories and I would do it all over again if I had the energy. I enjoyed every stage of life and now I'm enjoying this stage of quiet life. God has been good to us and we are grateful for His care and blessings.