Tag Archives: Monte Stewart

The ad hitlerum manqué

Image 1: Analogy to a pro-gay marriage rally

The Nevada Coalition for the Protection of Marriage is my nomination for the first Glenn Beck Award for WTF Analogies.  Just as Glenn Beck recently argued that science education advocate Bill Nye is like the Catholic Church in his rejection of teaching Creationism in public school science classes, the Nevada Coalition argues that homosexuals are like white supremacists in their desire to change the definition of marriage.  Monte Stewart, their attorney, argues (via ThinkProgress):

On closer examination, this strategy reveals something deeply troubling. White supremacists engrafted the anti-miscegenation rules onto the marriage institution — and thereby altered marriage from how it had existed at common law and throughout the millennia — to bend that institution into the new and foreign role of inculcating white supremacist doctrines into the consciousness of the people generally. Because of the profound teaching, forming, and transforming power that fundamental social institutions like marriage have over all of us, this evil strategy undoubtedly worked effectively for decades.

Question: Where does one see today a similar massive political effort to profoundly change the marriage institution in order to bend it into a new and foreign role, one in important ways at odds with its ancient and essential roles? Answer: The genderless marriage movement. The big difference, of course, is the immorality of the effort to advance the white supremacist dogma compared to the morality of the effort to advance the social well-being and individual worth of gay men and lesbians. Whether that moral objective is sufficiently weighty to justify so bending and altering the marriage institution is for the free, open, democratic process to decide. Certainly, the comparison of laws that protect the man-woman meaning of marriage to anti-miscegenation laws is a false analogy that provides no basis for any court to mandate the redefinition of marriage.

Yes, that is a big difference.  It’s such a big difference, that I wonder why Mr.Stewart decided to compare the two.  This is just like what the Nazis did, only you’re not Nazis and it’s not like what they did.  Perhaps we need a name for this move: let’s call it the ad hitlerum manqué.