Tuesday, December 08, 2009

The problem with pro-aborts is that they don't understand their opponents and don't try to

because it's just too convenient not to.

So if mass-murder is occurring, anyone who would have tolerated the preemptive killing of Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele to impede the Holocaust should logically also embrace the vigilante execution of abortion providers to save many innocent lives.

Actually, I wouldn't have, at least, unless it was a war-time situation.

Or, if one accepts this Holocaust analogy but believes all killing is wrong (ie. the rare absolutist who would not preemptively have killed Hitler), then, at the very least, one should renounce one's citizenship in such a bankrupt nation, or refuse to pay one's taxes a la Henry David Thoreau, or -- as the Buddhist monks did to protest American atrocities in Vietnam -- set oneself aflame in the name of bearing witness.

Right, like moving to a new country is just a matter of picking up and leaving.

But as it stands, Christians have a duty to their nation to improve it and fight for the rights of others.

Pro-lifers in Canada have attempted to not pay taxes, and they had to pay them anyway.

Set ourselves on fire? That would be suicide. Not moral.

Yet the inevitable consequence of her inflammatory language is that fanatics like Paul Hill and Scott Roeder follow her astounding premises to their cold, unavoidable conclusions.

Under a completely different set of morals that we are not responsible for.

It's a little like saying that Quebec nationalist rhetoric caused the FLQ to kill Pierre Laporte, or Marx's rhetoric caused Che Guevara to kill his opponents.

Inflammatory rhetoric doesn't make people kill.

If you believe you can stop an ongoing holocaust, why shouldn't you gun down the doctors you believe to be perpetrating it?

Because there are other value at play. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians were persecuted, but never did they argue that their enemies should be killed.

During the slave trade, those who fought slavery did so peaceably, leading slaves through the Underground Railroad.

John Brown was the exception that proved the rule of the peaceful nature of the abolitionist movement. He took those anti-slavery to their "logical" conclusion.

Should the abolitionists have shut up?

That sounds like a far more appropriate response to mass murder than touring the college

It sounds appropriate only if you're working on a certain set of assumptions.

We don't operate on those assumptions.

But don't actually try to find out why pro-lifers don't kill.

That might ruin your argument.

The piece boils down to "if pro-lifers don't act according to our moral assumptions, they're not really sincere.

What a self-serving argument.

The reality is that few (if any) sane people, however strong their views regarding the morality of abortion, sincerely believe that abortion clinics are like death camps.

Although I have never heard her speech,I can easily predict that Stephanie Gray's point would be that unborn children are killed because they are considered subhuman, just like Jews were killed because they were considered subhuman.

No analogy is perfect in every point. But the point is, abortion clinics serve to kill subhumans, and death camps served to kill subhumans.

But don't actually try to understand the analogy, it might ruin your argument.

They just say they are, because it's easier -- and far more dramatic -- than explaining what they really mean.

Well, I just explained it. It was fairly easy.

I have witnessed surgical terminations. I have also seen the mounds of human hair and baby shoes at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Most strikingly, I have heard first-hand horror narratives of deportation and starvation from elderly survivors, stories that my own relatives never survived to share. Any reasonable person who has any knowledge of the Nazi death machine should find the comparison of Planned Parenthood to Auschwitz-Birkenau an unacceptable affront to common decency.

Only because you do not understand the argument being made.

A Planned Parenthood is like a death camp because they kill unborn children because they are subhuman.

A death camp killed Jews et al. because they were subhuman.

The drama of the death camps does not diminish this argument. He's trying to make the emotionalism of the drama the measure of whether the analogy is valid, not the actual substance of the argument.

When will Abe Foxman stand up to this new generation of anti-abortion Holocaust misappropriators?

You can't stop people from making analogies from historical events. People can and do make analogies from horrible historical events: it doesn't mean the event was not horrific; it is a way of conveying a truth.

I assure her that it is not because we fear her ideas or public engagement -- but because some forms of argument are too repugnant to be indulged.

You go ahead and ignore her. She'll engage all the other people willing to listen to her. You can fail to understand what she says: her audience will know better and you won't reach them.

What Gray has no business doing is comparing the United States to Nazi Germany, or calling Plan B a modern-day Final Solution, or insisting that offering women reproductive options is the moral equivalent of massacring Jews. That is the sort of angry, empty rhetoric that gets innocent people killed and defiles the memory of others. It must stop.

It's only angry and empty to you because you've never actually understood what she's saying. I've heard her speak to the issue, and she's not angry or empty. She's not responsible for the morals of others, and she seeks to uphold the memory of others precisely because the horror of the Holocaust because she believes in the value of human life.

But completely ignore all that. Just engage in empty rhetoric of your own.

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