re-post from The Closet Professor. . . ..with permission, Thanks, 'Joe"

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Reductio ad Hitlerum

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocates are part of a "radical homosexual movement" that mirrors elements of Nazi Germany, Rick Wiles is claiming.

As Right Wing Watch is reporting, the TruNews host blasted the LGBT community in a heated broadcast with Pastor Jeff Allen, who has previously evoked Nazi imagery while condemning gay rights.

"It's not an exaggeration to say 'homofascist' because the German Nazi Party was homosexual," Wiles said. "Hitler was a homosexual, the top Nazi leadership, all of them were homosexuals...they were creating a homosexual special race."

Wiles went on to note, "It wasn’t this thing about an Aryan race of white people, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white people, Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers ... It will end up in America just like it was in Germany, but it won’t be the Jews that will be slaughtered. It will be the Christians."

In February, Wiles' guest offered up similar sentiments.

"Many [LGBT rights advocates] really do console themselves with fantasies of their own Kristallnacht, in which Christians are euphemistically 'taken out of the way' as part of the 'gay'-stapo’s 'final solution' to the 'Christian problem,'"Allen wrote in an Op-Ed for Liberty Counsel attorney Matt Barber's website Barbwire.

Similarly, the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer referred to LGBT rights advocates as "Nazi stormtroopers" who are "totalitarian and repressive" in a 2013 broadcast.

Wiles' TruNews promotes itself on its website as "the world’s leading news source that reports, analyzes, and comments on global events and trends with a conservative, orthodox Christian worldview."

Comparison with Nazis is so overdone that there's even a name for it: Godwin's Law. In this case the more appropriate name might be the older dog Latin term Reductio ad Hitlerum, a term coined by conservative philosopher Leo Strauss in 1951. According to Strauss, the Reductio ad Hitlerum is an informal fallacy that consists of trying to refute an opponent's view by comparing it to a view that would be held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.  According to Strauss, Reductio ad Hitlerum is a form of ad hominem or ad misericordiam, a fallacy of irrelevance, in which a conclusion is suggested based solely on something's or someone's origin rather than its current meaning. The suggested rationale is one of guilt by association. Its name is a variation on the term reductio ad absurdum.

It is not the first time that someone has compared equal rights advocates to fascists or nazism, but merely another example in a long line of accusations.  The arguments are ridiculous and those who use reductio ad Hitlerum are using poor fallacies because they are so uneducated and unable to make a credible argument.  All they want to do is rule people up by using the comparison to fascism.  Vladimir Putin recently did that to describe the Ukrainian government in order to invade the Crimea.  The use of such fallacies can also be called argumentum ad Nazium a variant derived from argumentum ad nauseam, meaning arguing to the the point of nausea.

If Rick Wiles wanted to compare LGBT advocacy groups to the Nazis, he picked a horrible comparison.  LGBT groups, and all equal rights groups, want equal rights for all, someone that Hitler and his followers never came close to believing in.