OPINION:
One of the unexpected voices of reason coming from our nation’s capital recently is that of Sen. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrat.
Here are just a few of the comments he has made over the past couple of weeks in response to his own party’s refusal to officially label Iran a state sponsor of terrorism despite its expressed twin goals of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”
“I can’t imagine why you can’t just identify what Iran is.”
“Why isn’t it a good thing to make it impossible for Iran to acquire and use nuclear bombs?”
“I’d like to remind my colleagues over in the House that Iran massacred 30,000 of its own citizens.”
“We should choose our country over our party.”
I posted Mr. Fetterman’s comments last week on my Facebook page, and one of my “friends” responded as follows: “Senator Fetterman’s arguments are foolish. America presently murders over 1 million preborn babies per year, yet Fetterman and the Republicans are focused on the wickedness of another nation. Who’s evil? We are worse than Iran.”
My Facebook pal is right about one thing: Some arguments are foolish, and his is foremost among them.
This kind of smug virtue signaling, especially from so-called conservatives, is historically ignorant and morally vacuous. It totally ignores the practical benefits of incrementalism and the fact that such all-or-nothing strategies often result in nothing for the untold millions who suffer because of the inaction of those who elevate their idealism above reality.
Here are some examples to make my point.
Would folks such as my Facebook pen pal argue that the North should have done nothing during the Civil War to fight the chattel slavery practiced by the South because the North still had its own sins of unjust labor practices?
Should the United States have done nothing during World War II to end the Nazi Holocaust because Americans were still guilty of our own cultural racism?
How about the Crusades? Was Rome wrong to stop Islam’s butchery of more than 280 million people across the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe because the church still had sinners in its own ranks?
“Horseshoe right” proponents, such as my Facebook pal, zero in on America’s immorality to argue that until we clean up our own house, we have no moral basis to do anything that is moral. This logic, or lack thereof, is broken and dangerous.
Yes, millions of babies are dying because of abortion and untold numbers of women are presently abused both at home and abroad, but the solution is not sanctimonious isolationism and false moral equivalencies. Even if some American men beat their wives and some American women abort their children, that doesn’t mean America has no moral authority to stop as many children from being killed and wives from being beaten as it can.
Arguing otherwise is frankly just weird, and it completely ignores the fact that such self-flagellation results only in more wife beating and more dead children, not fewer.
People like this need to read up on Augustinian Just War Theory a bit and learn why Christians have rightly embraced it for more than 1,500 years. If moral purity is a prerequisite for a nation acting morally, then we would all have to just sit on our hands and let the world burn.
Yes, some arguments are foolish, and those coming from “conservatives” such as my Facebook friend are dumber than those coming from the left of the aisle. Even John Fetterman understands that we live in a broken world, and that this all-or-nothing/either-or attitude is naive at best and complicit with evil in its extreme. Even he knows that America is not “worse than Iran” and that it is just nutty to claim otherwise.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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