A Seriously Broken Moral Compass

Rod Dreher equates the holocaust and abortion. While not surprising from the right, Dreher is sometimes seen as one of the more rational religious conservatives.

4 Comments

  1. 1
    Eclectic Radical says:

    Well, in Dreher’s defense, this is more rational than comparing exercising one’s right to protest and being arrested for doing so to the Holocaust. Everything is relative.

  2. 2
    Eclectic Radical says:

    That said, naturally, I disagree with Dreher’s position on abortion.

  3. 3
    Ron Chusid says:

    Eclectic,

    Dreher on one level might be more rational than the example you present, but on another level I find it more disturbing. I didn’t actually read the example you give, but if it is as you say it simply lacks any logic.

    I find Dreher more disturbing because of the warped logic behind his argument. The logic, to the degree there is any, is to deny any difference between the taking of life. He ignores both the facts that there is a profound difference between an embryo in early stages of development and a fully developed human. He also ignores the justifiable nature of abortion if one respects the rights of a woman to control her own body. He might disagree with this argument, believing that individuals are the property of the state as opposed to themselves, but to equate this with the holocaust is to seriously understate the horrors of the holocaust.

    What makes the holocaust so significant is not only that people were killed but that extent of it. Morally his argument borders on the mindset of holocaust deniers.

  4. 4
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I don’t disagree with you, but I have to fully admit to being ambivalent on the abortion issue. It is one of the few areas in which I actually find myself ‘moderate.’ I am pro-choice, even to the point that I believe the late-term (the so called ‘partial birth abortion’) ban was ridiculously misguided, because I believe that medical care is not an area where the government should be establishing broad bans based on narrow moral viewpoints. I believe a true pro-choice position is the only possible position and I believe that health care policy should provide less affluent patients the same choices as more affluent patients even if that means the government has to pay for things citizens don’t like.

    At the same time, I don’t like and am not comfortable with abortion. I don’t believe even most pro-choice advocates truly are. It is not hard for me to see how someone who truly believes what pro-lifers claim to believe about human life (and I believe a significant number of them are sincere in their convictions, after all I live and work in a state where flyers for pro-life protests are handed out in the workplace) really would, quite sincerely, equate abortion with the Holocaust. If one genuinely believes that abortion is killing a baby, then the sheer scale can be terribly horrifying.

    I disagree with Dreher’s analogy, myself, and I am even less comfortable with Holocaust analogies in arguments than I am with abortion… but I can still understand where a committed pro-life writer is coming from when they say it. If you accept they believe their own statements about human life, you cannot escape the analogy and its validity to them.

1 Trackbacks

Leave a comment