KKK / Slavery Analogies & [“New”] Pro-Life Democrats

Various thoughts of mine, and a few from friends of mine as well (in blue and green fonts):

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How could an obedient, magisterial Catholic (consistently, as opposed to “canonically”) vote for one who favors abortion in all nine months, when a pro-lifer is on the ballot?

I don’t ever vote for childkillers. I would by default if two pro-aborts were on a ballot and I had to choose the lesser of two evils. The Church permits that, but I think it is impermissible to vote that way when a pro-lifer (or, one who is — as part of a pro-life outlook — specifically anti-abortion) is on the ballot.

Perhaps someone (a liberal / “new pro-life” Catholic) can answer my recent (still unanswered query): would you vote for a KKK Imperial Wizard, overlooking the fact that he favored the lynching of black people, since he has other positions you like, and you’re not really voting for the killing?

I don’t see any ethical difference at all: none. In this case, the analogy to KKK racism and murder is perfectly valid.

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My esteemed friend, Nathaniel Sperling wrote:

Dave, we’ve had several good discussions on this, and I, as I’ve said before, respect that you’re willing to engage in a frank, but civil and charitable, conversation on this topic.

Likewise . . .

I think this an inapt comparison since it ignores the difference between someone who is commanding/overseeing that gravely immoral acts be carried versus someone who is tolerating, or, at worst, passively supporting, gravely immoral acts. Pro-choice politicians generally fall into the latter category. Remember, we’re not talking about the sin committed by the politician themselves (and, yes, tolerating/supporting gravely immoral acts, especially if you have the ability/power to try and prevent them, is objectively wrong, although we have no way of knowing how said sin is imputed on their soul, but we can say it is objectively wrong, even if there are mitigating factors that might reduce, even eliminate, the sin imputed to them), but whether it is objectively wrong for a Catholic to support said politician in spite of (not because of) their immoral policy and for a proportionate reason.

You yourself would vote for a Klansman who thought it was fine and dandy to kill black people; thought slavery and Jim Crow were great, etc.? This fact in and of itself would not immediately disqualify the candidate? That is the strength and force of the analogy.

I say that no one not insane would do so. And if they wouldn’t do that, I don’t see why they think they could vote for a Democrat childkilling advocate. There is zero ethical difference.

Under no circumstances would I support . . . a Stalinist, or Maoist: these are ideologies that are so murderous and vile (each one has millions of deaths and brutality on a scale that is utterly mind-boggling) that I think we would all agree there can never be proportionate reason to justify it.

Exactly. Thank you for confirming my analogy. I say that almost no one would vote even for a Klansman, who is equally evil in essence, but has caused far fewer deaths by murder than any of those three groups. Legal abortion has now far surpassed the numbers of murders by Stalin, Mao, and other mass murdering dictators and their minions.

My equally esteemed friend, Jonathan Prejean interjected:

Nathaniel, I am genuinely curious about this position, because I have never understood it. Objectively, abortion is the most serious social justice issue in sheer numbers and gravity. That is simply being objective, so it must be given the most moral weight. It is analogous to slavery at the time of the Civil War; there is no real basis for debate in that respect. The government’s complicity in abortion eclipses every other issue.

Whatever justification is given for a pro-choice candidate today could have been given (and, in fact, was given) for pro-slavery candidates. I do not think such votes were justified then, and I don’t think they could possibly be justified now. I can see not voting or voting third party if you honestly believe the cause is hopeless and lost, which was the stance I took in 2016, after Roberts turned liberal. But I don’t know how you can possibly rationalize supporting the institutionalization of abortion any more than people could rationalize voting for slavery. The proportionate reasons don’t add up.

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Slavery [was] a similarly grave evil inflicted on millions of people. At the time, there were people who argued that the government should simply allow it to die out on its own over time by removing the economic need for it. This justification was used to vote against the Radicals who favored abolition. It’s the same poor excuse now as it was then. Instead of pro-life, which has now been so abused by the opposite side, I wonder if we shouldn’t start calling ourselves the new abolitionists.

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[directed to someone else] would you agree that slavery would be a correct analogy in terms of (1) affecting millions of lives and (2) being more permitted than practiced by government? I haven’t been able to find a significant difference in terms of moral position between abortion and slavery in that regard.

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[to someone other than Nathaniel] So you would not (I’m assuming; perhaps wrongly) vote for a KKK leader on the grounds that he believed killing of blacks was justified? In other words, that would be a dealbreaker for you? But you would vote for the radical pro-abort (all nine months) on the grounds that he “holds positions more conducive to the common good and to protection of human dignity and human life than his opponent.” Both persons hold immoral views regarding the murder of innocent people. I see no difference. Perhaps you would be so kind as to inform me of the difference in ethical principle.

If you don’t answer, I say it is a cop-out and you would then be tacitly admitting the strength and force of the analogy. If you wouldn’t vote for the Klansman, you need to explain why you would vote for people who butcher nine-month-old [from conception] babies.

[This was blown off; so I replied]: Let me ask you, then, if I may: Does it bother you that a pro-life Democrat votes for the very people that Planned Parenthood, NOW, etc., firmly believe are the ones that will further their abortion agenda? Do you really think they are so stupid as to not know which candidate will promote their agenda?

They’re voting Democrat in order to maintain and increase abortions. The “new pro-lifer” / pro-life Democrat votes for the same people with the illusion that they will lower the numbers of abortions. Something has to give there. I think they are correct. There was a reason Hillary Clinton was given the “Champion of the Century” award by Planned Parenthood.

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[to a third person] I don’t think it works to make the distinctions of legal and illegal, because slavery was legal in the United States, just as abortion is now. Moral law transcends human laws. Slavery was legal before 1865. The Klansman who espoused the lynching of blacks en masse is immediately disqualified as a proponent of murder. And so are virtually all Democrats running today.

Pro-Life Democrats today, by analogy, would also be willing to vote for a KKK Grand Imperial Wizard. I would not ever do such a thing. There are things that immediately disqualify a person.

If two pro-aborts are on the ballot; we can vote for the relatively less evil one; I agree. I’m saying I would not personally vote for either, but that’s just my own personal opinion. Currently, we have rabid pro-abortion vs. an avid anti-abortion President. The choice is as easy as almost any I can imagine in November. Three pro-lifers added to the Supreme Court . . .

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Even though the slavery analogy makes [some] sense, I still think it’s inappropriate. I’m not denying the evils of abortion, but it just seems like comparing it to slavery (America’s original sin) . . . is overwrought, and, further, unhelpful. It seems like such analogies serve little purpose other than to rile up the preached-at choir and anger/offend people who are pro-choice, which, again, seems counterproductive to actually trying to get them to change their views, and makes it harder for us to collaborate with people who are pro-choice on areas outside of abortion where there might be agreement.

You have not overcome the force of the analogy. It’s not simply an emotional argument or name-calling. These are valid, legitimate reductio arguments by analogy. The ethics are equivalent: the wholesale murder or grotesque oppression and bondage of millions of human beings.

I’m not “calling my enemies Klansmen”; rather, I am saying that their ethics in supporting people who uphold the abortion genocide is indistinguishable from KKK morality. I have seen no one overcome the analogy so far; few have even tried, and I think it is because, down deep, they know that it has force.

The purpose of the analogy is to wake up folks and to virtually beg and plead with them to recognize the evil that they are supporting and literally making possible, by continuing to vote for pro-abort politicians. It’s like the thunderings of the prophets in the Old Testament, where God had the prophet Hosea actually marry a prostitute, to get people to wake up out of their sinful stupor in following idolatry and even child sacrifice (another direct analogy to what is happening now), or Isaiah walking around naked. The prophets were sounding the alarm, and it made them mighty unpopular, and virtually all of them were martyred as a result.

I think these analogies are unhelpful in terms of trying to convince pro-choice people to change their views. Further, these kinds of analogies will, in offending and enraging pro-choice people, will prevent us from being able to work with pro-choicers on areas where we do agree.

For instance, like it or not, many of today’s economic populists are pro-choice, and it’s hard to envision them wanting to work with us to fix the economy if we’ve just finished comparing [them] to slavery apologists [and the KKK].

In fact, I had to ban the discussion of abortion on my threads because, having a mix of pro-life and pro-choice FB friends, oftentimes when I would bring up support for various economic populists (such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. AOC, etc.), some pro-lifer would bring up the subject of abortion (often in a combative and aggressive way), which would then cause pro-choicers to fire back, and next thing I know, a discussion on promoting economic populism becomes a nasty argument between pro-choicers and pro-lifers.

Nathaniel, I’m with you on the “wise as serpents” stance requiring that people be silent at times. I actually think that this example might help people to empathize more with us. In other words, the point is not to judge the opposition but to point out that they shouldn’t expect us to be less strident on the point that those who opposed slavery or the KKK. Sometimes the issue is so important that you simply must take a stand.

I can work with anyone, where there is common ground (and we all should be able to do that). I put up articles commending the friendship between Justices Scalia and Ginsburg. Your argument here is merely a pragmatic one (“it offends folks of a particular persuasion x, which upholds an intrinsically sinful act, to identify it as such, so we ought not do it, in order to work together”). If we followed this philosophy, no societal evil could ever be publicly questioned:
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“We can’t question gay marriage because it offends millions of gays and therefore we can’t work with them to oppose terrorists or whatever else we agree on.”
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“Lincoln and even more ‘polemical’ abolitionists shouldn’t have said that slavery was evil because it offended slaveholding Southerners, making it impossible to work with them on issues where there was agreement.”

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“We can’t condemn racists today, lest we offend them . . . “

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Where does it end? Nowhere in the Bible does it ever teach a principle that we can’t or shouldn’t condemn evil because it will be pragmatically unwise or offend the hearers who hold the views.
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We must proclaim moral truth. We can’t compromise that. We can be nice and kind personally to those who hold wrong views; that’s fine and I do that. But it doesn’t follow that we can’t speak in the way I am speaking, in publicly condemning the evil of abortion, and the wrongfulness of how it is upheld, as a result of millions of proclaimed pro-lifers who vote for the very same people that Planned Parenthood endorses, as ones who will continue to allow legal abortion to continue and flourish.

Our job is not to have all and sundry love us because we are so “tolerant and reasonable.” Christianity is not a popularity contest. We have to speak truth, and be hated for it, as Jesus said we would be: all the way to martyrdom, if that is what is required. Christianity ain’t for wimps, in other words. It is always countercultural (i.e., insofar as culture is evil and sinful). It will always be hated by the world, and so will we if we consistently live it out and believe it.

I’m not talking about politics, but about consistent Christian ethical and moral principles. Perhaps this is why we are disagreeing. We are talking about two different things. We cannot not talk about this, simply because it offends people and makes political compromise more difficult. We have to try to rescue those being led to slaughter.

You have said won’t be an ally of bigots or Maoists or Stalinists (again, thank you for confirming my point), yet you will with folks who think it is perfectly permissible by law to take a fully-formed baby about to be born, deliver him or her up to the neck, insert scissors into the poor child’s neck and remove their brain. And all because they have no rights at all, not being yet outside the womb. Partial-birth infanticide is insane, diabolical madness, and was supported by every Democrat candidate for President in the primaries, except for Tulsi Gabbard (who is still pro-abortion, but to a less extreme degree).
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Please tell me the ethical difference between these groups of people. A person who would sanction that heinous evil is no better in that respect than a racist bigot KKK leader. What is the essential difference? You tell me.
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Most good so-called “pro-choice” Democrats and new pro-life voters would never consider voting for KKK Imperial Grand Wizard for one second; yet they will vote for the advocate of wholesale murder of defenseless preborn children. I don’t see any ethical distinction whatever and in my opinion no one has yet explained how the analogy can be overcome.
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Would anyone actually say that they would vote for a KKK leader because they advocated other good policies, such as government-paid daycare, stipends for poor pregnant women, welfare programs that help poor families, opposition to wars, etc.?: and that they were not voting for lynchings and bigotry and racist discrimination and hatred when they did so, but for these other compassionate policies?

I think this analogy (and reductio ad absurdum) in and of itself destroys the Catholic rationale for voting for pro-aborts (i.e., over against a pro-lifer on the same ballot). These are very serious and important ethical issues, and I continue to believe that abortion is the greatest social problem and evil of our time: much as slavery was in the 19th century.

I will never ever vote for a pro-abort if a pro-lifer is on the ballot. I think pro-lifers who do so (or any Christian of any stripe) have blood on their hands and help to bolster, further, and uphold the abortion genocide, as (in effect) a “useful idiot” for Planned Parenthood and its grotesque and diabolical mass murder / harvest body parts agenda.

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Ten Reasons Why Pro-Lifers Vote for Pro-Aborts [10-29-08]

Reply to Democrats for Life [5-1-12]

On the Complaint that Pro-Lifers are “Single-Issue” [9-24-15]

On Trump & the “Supreme” Pro-Life Cause [8-16-16]

Reply to “Left-Wing” Pro-Lifers (Crisis Pregnancy Centers, the Supreme Court, and “Old” Pro-Life Efforts to Help Struggling Pregnant Women) [10-24-16]

Dialogue with Deacon Steven Greydanus on Voting & Pro-Life [11-8-16]

“Lessen Evil” Votes for Hillary? (vs. Mark Shea) [4-7-17]

Debate: Do Liberal Social Policies Lessen Abortion & Poverty? [4-12-17]

Simcha Fisher’s “New” Pro-Life Critique of “Old” Pro-Lifers [Simcha did vote for Hillary Clinton] (+ vigorous Facebook discussion) [8-2-17]

Are “Old” Pro-Lifers Racists & “Anti-Woman”? (vs. John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe) [8-30-17]

“New” vs. “Old” Pro-Life Strategies (vs. John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe) [8-31-17]