Abortion: The Class Religion

WE all have been warned against the argumentum ad hominem. Of course a point can’t be settled by reference to the respective characters of the disputants: everybody knows that. Yet such arguments are politically potent. The question of a government energy policy boils down, for many people (including some senators), to whether the heads of oil companies are greedy. A campaign against pornography depends on disgust with pornography itself, no doubt, but it helps if the censorship advocate can excite repugnance against pornographers as a hateful class of men. Popular politics requires villains.

Abortion advocates have devoted a great deal of emphasis to what may appear to be defects in opponents of abortion. The purpose of this strategy is not so much to arouse hatred against anti-abortionists as it is simply to isolate them by making them seem to be the kind of people with whom you would be reluctant to associate yourself: narrow, sectarian (usually Catholic) sorts who are intolerant (they want to “impose” their “personal views” or “values” on the rest of us) and insensitive (abortion being, after all, a “complex” and “sensitive” issue, for which, as we all know, there are no simple or easy answers). This is a subtle strategy, for the gentleness with which it puts down its foes also has the simultaneous effect of making abortion’s proponents sound like a higher order of being— educated, low-keyed, alert to the most delicate moral nuance; sympathetic, self-effacing, troubled by the burden of their realization that no slogan will do.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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WE all have been warned against the argumentum ad hominem. Of course a point can’t be settled by reference to the respective characters of the disputants: everybody knows that. Yet such arguments are politically potent. The question of a government energy policy boils down, for many people (including some senators), to whether the heads of oil companies are greedy. A campaign against pornography depends on disgust with pornography itself, no doubt, but it helps if the censorship advocate can excite repugnance against pornographers as a hateful class of men. Popular politics requires villains.

Abortion advocates have devoted a great deal of emphasis to what may appear to be defects in opponents of abortion. The purpose of this strategy is not so much to arouse hatred against anti-abortionists as it is simply to isolate them by making them seem to be the kind of people with whom you would be reluctant to associate yourself: narrow, sectarian (usually Catholic) sorts who are intolerant (they want to “impose” their “personal views” or “values” on the rest of us) and insensitive (abortion being, after all, a “complex” and “sensitive” issue, for which, as we all know, there are no simple or easy answers). This is a subtle strategy, for the gentleness with which it puts down its foes also has the simultaneous effect of making abortion’s proponents sound like a higher order of being— educated, low-keyed, alert to the most delicate moral nuance; sympathetic, self-effacing, troubled by the burden of their realization that no slogan will do.