Jessica Valenti reports:
The political director of Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest and oldest anti-abortion organization, has been been arrested for solicitation of a minor. Luke Bowen has deleted his Twitter, removed his picture from LinkedIn—presumably because it matches the released mugshot—and taken down any mention of Texas Right to life on his LinkedIn work history.
Yeah. Of course. Yet another story of the moral turpitude of the “Right To Life” radicals. It shouldn’t even be notable these days.
What surprised me was my own reaction to this — it’s exactly what I just wrote. “Oh, so that’s unexpected.” It’s as if the hypocrisy is normal, and we know it’s not going to affect anyone. Those of us who are already attuned to the hypocrisy are going to tally it up, and those who aren’t won’t even think on it.
The funny thing is, holding this against the Texas Right to Life organization is technically an ad hominem fallacy. Strictly logically, we’d be fallacious in dismissing their arguments because of this.
But (and this is key) their arguments are based on morality. They claim a moral high-ground without presenting any kind of logic-based moral philosophy to support their arguments other than their own stated beliefs; so, the only defense of their arguments is their own moral conduct. If they conduct themselves in a way that demonstrates they don’t even believe their own statements of belief, it’s hard to accept any of their unsupported moral beliefs at face value.
This is why their hypocrisy is so important. It shows they don’t believe what they are trying to sell.
And that leads me to my conclusion: when you base an argument on unsupported moral statements, if you behave in a way counter to those moral statements, those moral statements are null and void. Or more concisely, if you are a moral hypocrite, any moral argument you make is immediately suspect and requires more than just an assertion.
At this point, ad hominem is no longer a fallacy. Once you base your assertions on moral character, judgement of moral character becomes central to the argument.
So, yeah. I’m ready to judge Texas Right to Life based on their chosen leadership. The fact they tried to silently scrub their own political director, rather than deal with the situation honestly and directly by censuring him, is all I need to know about them.
And I’m so tired of this being normalized.