I just read this article, where Conor says that:
“It’s only been a month since I decided that simply quoting Rush Limbaugh verbatim is the easiest way to discredit him, and the best way to force his apologists to confront the ugly reality of his indefensible program. I didn’t think I’d revisit it so quickly, having been pretty busy detailing the Obama Administration’s ongoing assault on states’ rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. It’s unending work.”
“But then a reader tipped me off to this Limbaugh gem:
Well, it’s a good point. You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.*”
Conor, frankly, as a journalism major one would hope you’d be more attuned to the actual arguments wrapped in the rhetorical dressing. So, a quick lesson in polemics, for everyone out there who thinks that provocative language by itself proves the falsity of an argument.
First, let’s figure out what the argument is. I’m no logic-diagramming genius, but we’ll give it a shot.
Is Rush proposing shooting women in the vaginas, as a commenter on the article posited? No, he is not, and looking at his statement that way is amazingly narrow-minded and fault-finding.
Rush is saying that those who desire that abortion be legal are also the people most stridently opposed to any sort of gun usage or gun freedoms, and that this is entirely inconsistent. Hypocritical, even. He’s inviting listeners to unravel this inconsistency themselves by figuring out the values at stake in each issue and seeing how they conflict.
This, incidentally, is entirely consistent with the range of positions associated with the current ideological spectrum. Liberals/progressives/self-styled-intellectuals are typically pro-abortion (“right to choose” “women’s body” etc) and anti-gun (see also the entire current post-sandy-hook debate.)
The question is about which position is more important to those people.
Obviously, wanting to shoot babies is horrific. But abortions happen every day and are perfectly legal. Congress has so far banned partial-birth and late-term abortions, but what about early ones? What if the beating hearts of the prenatal kiddies had to be extinguished with a bullet, instead of being sucked out with a vacuum? Would the pro-abortion folks insist that they still have their right to “choose”?
Or would the gun-control advocates win out, and prevent abortions because guns are too dangerous and unnecessary for the citizenry to have?
What’s the priority? What are the values? There are none. If you advocate a “right to choose”, i.e. killing babies, but can’t bear the thought of people owning their own guns, “for the children of Sandy Hook”–also a “right”, and one that actually happens to be explicitly mentioned in the constitution, unlike abortion–then you’re a hypocrite because you are for your pet liberties but against others that you don’t like, even when the results are exactly the same.
If you are against guns in order to avoid killing people but are pro-abortion, then you’re inconsistent. If you value individual rights (right to choose) yet are against personal liberty in owning firearms, you are inconsistent. Yet this is the position many liberals have.
Seems to me that there’s major intellectual inconsistency there, and that Rush’s simple statement sums up the two conflicting positions nicely, albeit in an inflammatory and provocative way. But that’s his job. Your job is to see the argument, instead about wondering the mechanics of shooting women in the vaj.
Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints 