Macaquin
4d ago
on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing.
It seems the attacker was only a critic of Muslim immigration on unusually principled anti-religious grounds. Here he is in 2019 (fedora and all -- wow!) discussing his website for aiding the asylum claims from secular Gulf refugees. More recently, he accused the German state of conspiring against atheist Saudi asylees and threatened to fight and kill over this:
First: I assure you that if Germany wants a war, we will fight it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride. Because we have exhausted all peaceful means and all we have received from the police, state security, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the (Federal) Ministry of the Interior is more crimes against us. Peace is of no use with them.
Rather than the hard right, it will be assimilationist centrists and center-rightists who want to make the problem of immigration to be about Islam who won't have much to milk out of this.
Macaquin
10d ago
To make this argument work, you have to consider the problem with private promiscuity to be just that it's a lack of honesty. Then it's only that to the extent those involved placed some idiosyncratic value on avoiding the act. Many people have such standards (such as religious diet restrictions) which outsiders don't have much reason to care about.
On the other hand, if there's some intrinsic reason promiscuity is bad, women who do it publicly aren't only doing the same thing but honest. They're suspect because its publicity creates an added inappropriate relation, now with a public who shouldn't be involved at all, above the men involved.
None of this is to say you should be tolerant of the presentable slattern either...but treating it as just a matter of hypocrisy demeans the issue.
The surface content of this speech isn't hard to address: Being strongly against abortion and understanding it to be actual infanticide means judging your peers, judging your friends, judging your family, and in some cases judging yourself. And judgement (which Christians especially have to understand) isn't free righteousness: it means burning bridges or having them burned for you, it means condemning your society in general, and it means permanently ending your ability to be mentally at ease with the state of the world around you, because abortion isn't a faraway war with dubious link to your circle of responsibilities, but something that most likely happens near you and is perpetrated by people you know and have to find productive ways to engage with regardless. It's not very different from being a child and realizing your parents are terrible people. Especially when you will (and, as a Christian, should) continue to love them through their ugliness.
I don't expect any pro-choicer to be wowed by these considerations, but why would they be? That's not the substance of the question. That's whether abortion is bad. Which is all anyone cares about here, and that's the real problem with this sermon. Pro-lifers are supposed to oppose abortion because it's systemic infanticide; if (as the sermon pretends) the problem is that people are relishing in righteous feelings over serious righteous conduct, why isn't the main fault that they're instrumentalizing what should be a serious cause for personal gain? The whole frame makes no sense without assuming that pro-lifers are wrong on the substance first (or that would necessarily be the most important thing) and should care more about this pastor's pet causes instead. The speech is blatantly about laundering those ideas and not interrogating anyone's sinful hearts. It's not just the usual annoying and self-indulgent partisan fap session, but essentially dishonest in presentation.
The other points just obviously don't have substance. How are orphans and widows being thrown under the bus? No one knows. What specifically do you want to question about "patriarchy"? No one knows. The idea unifying these examples is that abortion is suspect because it's one issue that does not revolve around finding and justifying the debts you owe to other people, and that this is sort of the "legitimate default attitude" if you're a morally serious person. You probably feel it's hard to address decisively because this is a very peculiar idea that doesn't get defended as seriously as it would have to be.
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