When IUD means Heil Hitler
by digby
Just the other day Ross Douthat strongly implied that progressives were Nazi eugenecists at heart. (As Ed Kilgore quipped, “[Douthat proposes that] the ‘progressive’ interest in genetic engineering, bred into the DNA of Planned Parenthood, loaded with racism and other hateful assumptions, was chased into the shadows by association with Nazism—but now it’s time has come!”)
Eric Metaxas, a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian known for his stand against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party … compares the federal requirement that contraception be covered in employer provided health insurance packages “to unnamed laws passed in the early stages of Hitler’s rise to power, that it is putting the United States on a similar course to the horrors of Nazi Germany and that it is therefore incumbent upon Christians in America to view the struggle against the HHS Mandate as Bonhoeffer viewed the struggle against Nazism at its earliest stages.”
Metaxas has been saying such things on national television and in other prominent venues.
So let’s summarize. A biographer of anti-Nazi hero Bonhoeffer claims, providing no evidence, that a minor albeit controversial provision of a government insurance regulation, is like laws promulgated in the early years of the Nazi era, and the struggle against it carries the implied moral equivalence to Bonhoeffer’s Christian struggle against the Nazis.
Makes your head swim doesn’t it?
These are the fever dreams that are animating the right wing at the moment. They are so overwrought that they believe the corporate friendly Health Care bill is leading inexorably to the Holocaust.
I guess I need to spend some time in the toxic wingnut wading pond and get up to speed. The last I heard, we were recklessly careening toward communism. It’s hard to keep up.
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