Remember when BruiserBlog favorite Ryan T. Anderson comforted a distraught middled-aged woman by comparing same-sex marriage to abortion and I pointed out how stupid that was? Well I guess he must have missed it. Somewhat to my surprise, he’s still banging that drum. In a new post on right-wing web publication The Federalist, Ryan–after some characteristic whining, and pimping his new book–opines:
Will the defenders of marriage be treated like bigots? Will our society and our laws treat Americans who believe that marriage is the union of husband and wife as if they were the moral equivalent of racists?
Perhaps not. Think about the abortion debate. Ever since Roe v. Wade, our law has granted a right to abortion. Yet, for the most part, pro-life citizens are not treated as though they are “anti-woman” or “anti-health.” Those are just slurs from extremists. Even those who disagree with the pro-life cause respect it and recognize that it has a legitimate place in the debate over public policy.
First, I won’t paint with broad strokes here, but some in the anti-choice movement are in fact anti-woman. But I’m not going down that path.
Listen, Ryan, I already covered why these things are not the same or even similar. It’s not apples to oranges, it’s apples to brussels sprouts….they’re not even in the same family. Most on the anti-abortion side see an innocent victim, and the taking of a life. That simply doesn’t exist in marriage (both spouses are willing victims, and their lives are only ending in the jocularly hyperbolic sense).
Before I noticed Ryan tweeting this, I saw fellow blogger David Cary Hart’s post on it (he hits on more of the points in Ryan’s latest hogwash–which frankly was TL;DR for me–so it’s worth a read), and in echoing my own thoughts, he had this to say:
More to the point Obergefell is not Roe. Nothing could be more illustrative of this than the fact that the pro-life (really anti-choice) movement has secular support while opposition to same-sex marriage falls strictly along religious lines. Indeed, Anderson’s opposition is a product of his ultra-orthodox Catholicism. Of course Anderson’s opposition to Roe is for the same reasons.
However, believing that a fetus is a baby, anti-choice activists visualize a flesh and blood victim. There is simply no visceral comparison with regard to same-sex marriage.
But wait, what’s this? Has Ryan developed a bout of realism?
Will the same tolerance [as that shown to those who are “pro life”] be shown to those who believe the truth about marriage? Will the government respect their rights of conscience and religious liberty? It doesn’t look good. So far, the trend has been in the opposite direction. We must now work to reverse it.
He loves that meaningless phrase “the truth about marriage” so much that he titled his book (did you hear he has a new book out?) Truth Overruled. I wouldn’t say this is realism so much as alarmism, as he spends the rest of the piece trying to make people feel better about their opinions (“it’s totally different than race!”) and stoking fear that if they don’t do something, they will be treated like social lepers and the government will steal all of their religious freedoms. Of course, if you just buy his book, he has all kinds of information there on just what to do now.
Nice try, Ryan.
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