Trego's Mountain Ear

I always credited this quote to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It turns out that the original was Bernard Baruch, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

According to QuoteInvestigator.com “In 1983 U.S Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a member of the National Commission on Social Security Reform. He employed the saying within an op-ed piece in the “Washington Post”:

“There is a center in American politics. It can govern. The commission is just an example of what can be done. First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.” So I have the original Moynihan quote – and it is a little different from the Baruch quotation.

My father credited Moynihan with the destruction of the Black family – when I finally asked the right question – basically a why do you believe this- I realized he had never read the Moynihan report – the title is The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (published in 1965 and available at https://old.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/

Dad had confused the messenger with the message. Perhaps because Lyndon Johnson continued his ‘Great Society’ message and policy despite Moynihan’s recommendations, possibly because Johnson never bothered to read Moynihan’s report. Moynihan wrote the facts as he saw them in 1965 – and history has demonstrated that he was correct.

I’m sure Moynihan never knew that Dad had the wrong opinion of his report and the wrong facts. I’m fairly sure that he knew President Johnson had a flawed opinion based on incorrect facts.

A lot of our current political differences can be seen as people insisting on their own facts. When the definition of “woman” becomes something we don’t agree on, we have a communication problem. I have a tendency to accept Mussolini’s definition of fascism – others accept Joe Stalin’s. Those different ‘facts’ have been around for nearly a century – and the Soviet definition included all Capitalists.

When the definitions change, people have their own facts. In the mid-eighties, when I taught at Trinidad, only one hospital – Mount San Rafael – and only one surgeon – Dr. Stanley Biber – was performing transexual surgery. Biber required a lot of counseling before performing the surgery – no one considered the surgery, available only in a rural Colorado hospital – to be normal. Now, with athletes and assassins arguing the meaning of the word “woman”, and with at least one Supreme Court Justice unclear on the definition, we have disagreements over facts.

Are Palestinians facing genocide, or did they attack and murder/kidnap 1300 people a couple years back? It’s past time to quit changing definitions. We can’t afford to have people who are a couple bubbles off making their own facts.