Sunday, June 9, 2013

A Raised Eyebrow to PledgeProLife.com

Those unduly curious as to the views of 'cool gal[s] from Oregon' who also consider themselves 'proud Roman Catholic conservative[s]' can do worse than to take to Twitter, where they will likely come across the below caps lock enthusiast who describes herself as one of many "AMERICANS FOR AN ABORTION-FREE IRELAND!"

Original tweet here, assuming not deleted. Her enthusiasm for confining Irish abortions to home abortion kits or England is expressed by her promotion of Youth Defence's PledgeProLife.com. Youth Defence describes this site as representative of "80,000 voters [sic] who will never vote Fine Gael again". Yet I could find no evidence that this Oregon based conservative has been a member of said party, nor was I able to find a townland called Oregon in any traditional Fine Gael voting county.

One may consider this an aberration, but when we look further we see that the "largest Pro-Life Organization [sic] in Illinois" has also decided to cease its doubtless pivotal support for Fine Gael, and is earnestly promoting this pledge so its members also take their votes elsewhere.


You can view their tweet of support here. Encouragement to sign this supposedly Irish petition can also be found on their Facebook page.

Fine Gael TDs holding seats in New York will doubtless be caused sleepless nights when they discover that Patrick Umbra, a Supreme Director of the Order of Alhambra in that fine state, possesses not only a rather grandiose title but also a cancelled Fine Gael membership form, and will doubtless be encouraging his underlings to also change their political affiliation:


Youth Defence is not held in common regard as a champion of the truth. They're only popular in the States. Their petition is being promoted by interest groups in other countries and contains no indication that they would prefer Irish residents only.

They could have avoided some of these criticisms had they gone with one of any number of third party, impartial petition facilitators like change.orgipetitions.comgopetitions.com or avaaz.org. With such a service it is at least trickier for widespread faking of results. Instead Youth Defence have opted to host it on their own servers. They presumably ask us to rely on their reputation for trustworthiness when pondering if the data has been manipulated.

They're already representing US residents as Fine Gael voters, what's to stop them also making up fictitious signatories? I humbly suggest approaching the results of their website with caution.

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