Moral equivalency?

Josh Chafetz has a complaint:

DISGUSTING MORAL EQUIVALENCE WATCH: Andrew Stuttaford calls those who want to ban smoking on a beach "the health mullahs." Explain to me why this is any less objectionable than leftists calling members of the religious right the "American taliban." Or is moral equivalence only a problem when practiced by the left?

Well, to be fair, people sometime say things like this with tounge-in-cheek. I have, for instance, heard people use the phrase "health nazi" in such a way that it was clear that they didn't really believe there was equivalency between the Nazis and the person they were talking about. I don't approve of this particular use of language, but if it's obvious that the speaker doesn't really believe it, then it's hard for me to get to worked up.

When it comes to the use of the phrase "American taliban" and the like, I must say that most of the people I've seen comparing the "religious right" to the Taliban actually seemed to believe it.

For my part, the difference really does come down to whether or not the speaker believes the rhetoric. If they do believe it, their moral compass is seriously off and needs to be reset. If they don't believe it, then they're guilty of helping to remove the significance of important words. This is very dangerous as it leads to the degradation of words in the public debate. ¹ It is not, however, on the same plane as those who draw these comparisons and actually mean it.

I guess I'd say that these type of comparisons are always wrong. It's just that they're not always equally damaging.

From Stuttaford's comment, I'm not sure how seriously he meant his "health mullah" comment, so I'm not sure where on the spectrum it falls.

¹ For instance, the only reason I can think of that a sane person could compare Bush to Hitler is that the moral weight of what Hitler actually did has been severed from his name in the public mind. "Hitler" now just basically means a bad man to a lot of people. (Of course there are the total wackos who expect Bush open prison camps for political opponents any day now. There's no helping those people.)

Comments

[Joe Carter]

Josh's complaint seems rather silly considering that a "mullah" is simply an Islamic religious leader. Unlike "Taliban" or "Nazi”, the term mullah does not have the obvious connotation of an evil fascist.

Then again, maybe we’ve reached the point when anything associated with Islam is considered evil. Otherwise, why use the term “mullah” at all in that context?

[Joel Fuhrmann]

Regardless of the labels used, it is rather inconsistent for some people to complain about "the religious right" wanting to control our lives (get government out of our bedrooms!), and then get government right back in with regulations on practically everything else: ban SUVs! (get government in our garages!) ban development! (let government tell us where we can live!)