Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Jacoby relativism

So Jeff Jacoby's grand defense of the gay marriage ban is that Jim Crow was worse.

I'm truly amazed. I never thought to argue that something isn't an injustice unless you can prove it's the greatest injustice ever. Talk about setting the bar high. Or is that low?

Try this on for size. The afternoon of 9/11, suppose you went around saying, "Yeah, it sucks. But the Nanking massacre was really horrible, so how 'bout we let this one slide.

3 comments:

susan said...

No, I really couldn't imagine having walked around on 9/12 saying that. Is this what's known as a reductio ad absurdum?

Ben said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ben said...

To flesh the thought out a little more, Jacoby spends hardly any time at all explaining why he thinks banning gay marriage is good. The bulk of the op-ed simply elaborates how much worse blacks had it during the segregation days. That's objectively true, but so what? Every law or action has to be judged on its own terms. So that's where my analogy was coming from.