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Tony Dungy uses a heart attack survivor to attack women's rights [1]
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Date: 2023-01-20
Tony Dungy, Hall of Fame NFL coach, is deeply religious. For him, God is the wellspring of all goodness in the world. So when Buffalo Bill safety, Damar Hamlin, survived a well-publicized cardiac arrest during an NFL game, Dungy credited God with his eventual recovery — through prayer. As he told the receptive audience at the annual March for Life in DC,
"It’s amazing to me that God actually used football to shine some light on the subject of life for all of us. Three weeks ago, during a game in Cincinnati, something happened that impacted our entire country. A young man named Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills made a routine tackle, and his heart stopped beating right on the field. It could’ve been tragic, but something miraculous happened. Team medical staff rushed out and they got Damar’s heart started again, but you know what? That wasn’t the miracle. The real miracle was the reaction of everyone to that. The announcers on the broadcast, what did they say? “All we could do is pray.” And all across the country, people started praying. Lauren and I were having dinner with friends of ours, and we stopped what we were doing, and we prayed right there."
How divine. It makes you wonder why all the EMTs, nurses, and doctors who treated Hamlin were there. If God is going to handle it, what role did they play? Let us ask larger questions. If prayer cures, why does the Catholic Church build so many hospitals? And if prayer leads to improved life outcomes, why is US life expectancy lowest in the Bible Belt?
Scientific studies on the effects of prayer provide more granular data. One of the earliest was a survey of the British Royal Family in the 1870s by statistician Francis Galton. Galton showed that the Royals — whose long lives congregations across England prayed for every Sunday as part of the Church of England’s liturgy — did not live longer on average than others.
More recent studies (double-blind) of cardiac patients — in 2006 by the Templeton Foundation and in 2003 by Duke University — show that third-party prayers did not affect the outcome of heart patients.
Let me note here that personal prayers can be a source of comfort to the afflicted, an aid for decision-making, or even a last resort to give the supplicant a sense that they are doing something about their situation (no matter how pointless). And if prayers are significant to the reader, more power to them. However, as a medical cure for cardiac arrest, they are a non-starter.
Dungy had more to say. As he told the crowd,
“Well, those prayers were answered, Damar’s recovering now, he’s home, and he’s been released from the hospital, but what’s the lesson in that? An unbelievable thing happened that night. A professional football game with millions of dollars of ticket money and advertising money on the line. That game was canceled. Why? Because a life was a stake, and people wanted to see that life saved. Even people who are not necessarily religious got together and called on God.”
Only in America is forgoing business revenue a sign that you are a holy person. Dungy does not mention the NFL’s other considerations — those would be inconvenient for his argument — so I will. I suspect the decision-makers at the NFL were more motivated by optics than God — after all, this is an organization that makes money off the backs of men with significantly increased odds of suffering CTE and dementia.
In their bottom line calculation, I am sure the accountants showed that canceling one out of the 272 regular-season NFL games (<0.4%) would have less impact on their bottom line than the worth of the goodwill the NFL would accrue from a cancellation. The league will not lose any TV revenue. And any accommodations they make to ticket holders and advertisers will be many times offset by the millions in free publicity the NFL received.
Dungy does not care for logic — he backs a guy for whom there is no evidence — therefore, his critical thinking skills are atrophied. So he plowed ahead and tied his supernatural explanation for Hanlin’s recovery into the rally's theme.
“Well, that should be encouraging to us because that’s exactly why we’re here today because every day in this country, innocent lives are at stake. The only difference is they don’t belong to a famous athlete, and they’re not seen on national TV. But those lives are still important to God and in God’s eyes.”
The “innocent lives” he refers to are aborted fetuses (and for this diary, I will use Dungy’s charged vocabulary). Sadly, neither Dungy, his religion, nor his politics have any plan to save those innocent lives. Banning abortion does not reduce abortion. It just makes it illegal. To reduce the number of innocent lives lost, you must make free contraception widely available. And you have to design social programs that give poor mothers the financial security to look after another child. I say “another” because 61% of women getting abortions already have a kid.
They know about life in a way the comfortably-raised, middle-class, and now wealthy Dungy never will.
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