..."Another example occurred at Virginia Commonwealth University last year, while the nation was debating Obamacare’s contraception mandate. VCU held a panel discussion, during which one of the mandate’s opponents said forcing Catholic institutions to provide birth control was like forcing a Jewish deli to serve ham sandwiches: It violated religious freedom unnecessarily, since the product in question is easily obtainable elsewhere.
You can argue the point, but another panelist (a professor, no less) chose not to. Instead, she accused the previous speaker of saying women were nothing but meat sandwiches. This not only misses the point entirely. It gets the analogy wrong not once, but twice: Nothing was being called a sandwich at all — and even if something had been, that something was contraception, not women.
The first speaker feebly objected that he had not called women sandwiches. “Yes you did!” bellowed a number of students in the audience. So much for higher education.
Analogies admittedly need some unpacking. Yet to those seeking an excuse for outrage, even simple comparisons are often too complex. Several days ago the conservative blogosphere erupted in fury because “Liberal Rep. Alan Grayson Compares Republicans to Dog Poop.” Well, yes and no: In a floor speech, the Florida Democrat ran down a list of things that, according to a recent poll, were more popular than Congress — including witches, hemorrhoids and doggy doo-doo. Funny stuff — and nonpartisan to boot. Yet inside the right-wing echo chamber Grayson was calling everyone in the GOP a piece of dung.
On Fox News Insider, we are told that “Joe Biden Compares Republicans to ‘Squealing Pigs.’” The vice president didn’t say Republicans were pigs, though that was Fox’s obvious implication; he said that’s what their complaints about Wall Street regulation sounded like.
The conservative site The Blaze highlighted a clip in which “Former Bush Chief Strategist Compares Conservatives to the Flintstones.” This, apparently, was supposed to elicit knee-jerk indignation. Others were furious that MSNBC’s Rachel “Maddow Compares Republicans to Weasels on Angel Dust.” She used that splendid image to depict how viciously party leaders were tearing one another apart.
Even light-hearted commentary becomes grist for the synthetic-outrage mill. When Rep. Jan Schakowsy fired up the Democratic troops by playing theme music from “Star Wars,” this became: “Schakowsky Compares Republicans to Genocidal Stormtroopers!”...
http://reason.com/archives/2013/10/21/w ... bout-polit
