Thursday, September 24, 2009

Everything I Hate is the Same Thing

There is a common human error, for which there ought to be a name, which is assuming that all the things you hate are somehow connected, or even are somehow expressions of the same deeper reality. Case in point: Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa has decided that gay marriage is socialism:
If there's a push for a socialist society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they have to go to, same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation, they want access to public funds and resources. . . . Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.
But as this case shows to anyone with a mind, the things we hate may be completely unrelated. It is not true that warmongering is racist, that capitalism is sexist, that high taxes destroy traditional communities, or that gay marriage promotes socialism.

Now that I think about it, this might be a subspecies of "tabloid thinking," which is defined in rhetoric as assuming that things are much simpler than they are. But it still deserves a special name.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Not to mention that many socialist regimes, most famously Cuba, have condemned homosexuality and prosecuted it actively. "Socialist morality" before the sixties was highly puritanical.