Jesse Johnson: The Ineptitude of Moral Equivalence

As I’m sure you’ve heard, yesterday a Newspaper office in Paris was attacked by gunmen who murdered twelve people. The specific targets were the paper’s editorial cartoonists, and the motive for their murder was the fact that they had often drawn cartoons disparaging Mohammad.

While the attack was swiftly condemned by many political leaders—France’s own president called it “an exceptional act of barbarism”—it was also met by many people eager to protect the reputation of Islam. The fact that the murders were done to avenge the reputation of Mohammad and that the politically correct response was to protect Islam’s reputation is ironic indeed.

MSNBC compared the ideology of the fundamentalist Muslims who carried out the crime with the ideology of Jerry Falwell and Liberty University. Several American politicians and journalists made comments along the lines of “all religions have their fundamentalists responsible for violence” (and of course, remember this from Salon? “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick: A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian”).

These kind of comments demonstrate our culture’s tendency toward moral equivocation. We value relativism so much that we have lost the ability to say that some religions are enemies of both truth and freedom. Read more