“The Stupidest Analogy Ever:” Fox Regular Jay Sekulow Compares Contraception Rule With Mandatory Pork Consumption

And thus it started. Since that February 13th edition of Sean Hannity’s show I’ve heard politicians and pundits adopt this analogy; use it many times. But I have to disagree with Media Matters. The analogy isn’t “stupid.” Like most Right Wing talking points they just have it back-ass-wards. But it’s difficult to step in the way of back-ass-wards talking points once the Santorum starts to rise.

So let’s have a talking point pork off!!!

The not so vague, very perverse, allusion is certainly intentional. I find most talking points, when repeated over and over again, about as sick and undesirable as a TV “reality” show with a group of men trying to outdo each other as to how far they shoot their wad. “Undesirable?” Maybe I should rethink that in a day where talking points like this approach the intellectual content of the least intelligent characters in the movie Idiocracy.

But here’s my contribution anyway…

1. No one is “forcing” the doctors, or the nurses, or the staff in Catholic hospitals, or any other religion, to take birth control. So forcing them to eat pork is about as idiotic a comment as feeding a bad sports drink to plants, sans water, hoping they will grow.

2. This is a medical diagnosis: a common part of medicine. You may disagree with it being so, but it is legal and common. The true analogy here is it’s like it being against your religion to eat pork, so you demand that no one else will eat pork. Or travel long distances, going hospital to hospital, trying to find some facility that will allow them to have pork.

But after that the analogy breaks down even further. I can go to my next door neighbor and I’d probably find pork. Birth control? Not so likely, and since some birth control effects the body: medical advice and help is important. Even rubbers can cause skin reactions among some of the populace.

So if I get a real nasty reaction from a Trojan; maybe even life threatening when not tended to in time, does this mean if the only hospitals and medical personnel in my tiny, remote town, refuse to treat me due to conscience, I must die attempting to get to a facility far away?

Plus there are medical reasons to provide birth control that go beyond pregnancy: no medical reason one must have pork that I know of, so their use of the analogy breaks down even more.

This is the core of the problem here: refusing to treat patients. Which is more important: the patient or your religion? In some faiths prayer is the only accepted healing tool. So I must die if I happen to walk into the wrong waiting room where I can only be prayed to death, is that acceptable?

But I know how any debate based around this talking point would go…

Last night I watched Young Turks on Current TV. Cenk Uygur attempted to debate Andrew Breitbart whose idea of “debate” is to filibuster those he debates with with his own favorite talking points. At one point he claimed the media hadn’t covered all the rapes that had happened at Occupy Wall Street camps; which is why he recently was calling all the OWS folks at a occupation “rapists” and “murderers.” Where “murderers” came from, who knows and Cenk didn’t have time to address that one because after Cenk had his staff put up quotes from the major networks and other media sources,  proving they had covered it, Breitbart started lying about what he had just said.

It turned into mostly a yell off, as attempts to have anything close to a civilized discussion with Breitbart tend to do.

Note: there are also plenty of quotes from OWS folks concerned about this problem, and about how policemen were dropping off, and directing, mentally ill, dangerous, people to go to an encampment to get free food and medical help. So to blame it all on every OWS-er is a pure vilipend talking point.

“A civilized discussion?”

Breitbart would have none of that, declaring that Cenk was misquoting what he had just said. What I had just heard him say. He talked fast, talking over Uygur, using different variations of the “out of context” talking point over and over again: he who is most famous by getting an appointee fired for pulling a quote out of context.

This is exactly what I would expect if I confronted the porksters. When confronted they attempt to weasel out of their own words, only to go back to shooting their rhetorical wad again and again after our confrontation is done.

Which is why I use the somewhat obscene, “pork off.”

It also serves to tell them what they can do with such BS laden talking points.

-30-

Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 30 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.

©Copyright 2011
Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
All Rights Reserved