Greeted As Liberators - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates stumbled across the anti-abortion crowd that features themselves as the new John Browns last week after his analysis of Rick Santorum’s statement.
The controversial historical anti-slavery figure is not the best example of a hero. Before the Harper’s ferry event there was the massacre, and the religious zealot who chopped off husband’s and son’s heads with claymores in front of their wives and daughters was also a terrorist. This is exactly why Scott Roeder & Bloody Randall Terry types misapply the lessons learned and twist the anti-slavery analogy to try to apply it to abortion.
Last week, after my row with abortion and slavery, I received a number of missives from people quick to note their alleged lack of sympathy for the likes of Rick Santorum, but quicker still to insist that one of the most prodigious slave societies in human history really was a lot like the termination of fetal life. To wit:
Your main logical flaw seems to be here: you fail to recognise that there is more wrapped up in the statement “the right to exist” than its most literal reading. Your argument is correct if the most literal reading of the statement — that “the right to exist” means simply “the right to be alive” — is the one that Mr. Klein meant. You make it quite clear that slaveholders wanted their slaves to remain alive. This reading, however, cannot be what Mr. Klein meant. I would suggest that what he meant was something more like “the right to exist as a full human person, with the right to exercise the same freedoms (or more accurately, the right to eventually exercise the same freedoms) and dignity that any other person has.”
It’s an interested reading—one that changes the argument by broadening it out to the outermost limits of analogical absurdity. Denial of the right “to exercise the same freedoms and dignity that any other person has” is not what makes slavery distinctive, nor is it particular to slaves. The vast majority of people in this country belong to a class that, at some point, was denied “the same freedoms and dignity that any other person has.” Indeed, I fear pro-lifers have been much too modest. By their logic, zygotes are analogous not just with slaves, but with Native Americans, freedmen, women, gays, immigrants, children and property-less white men.