The Guilt-By-The-Most-Tenuous-Association Gambit

In comments, embarking on the futile quest to develop an ex post facto rationale for outrage over the Burlington Coat Factory community center that sounds non-discriminatory, the Sanity Inspector argues:

If it helps, think of this analogy: In order to build bridges with Vietnam, signaling a new era of friendship and bridge-building with them, let’s put up a statue of General Westmoreland next to their war memorial in Hanoi.

It does, if not in the way that Mr. Inspector intends.   I assume most of you who are seeing this for the first time can sport the glaring fallacy here. General Westmoreland was actually personally responsible in some respect for the death of many Vietnemese citizens. Feisal Abdul Rauf had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So the analogy is transparently specious, and this goes for all of the variants, up to and including Newt Gingrich’s “Nazi sign next to the Holcaust museum” crap.

Given that they’re based on guilt-by-association, in other words, these analogies merely reaffirm that opposition to Park51 is driven pretty much exclusively by religious discrimination and bigotry. As I’ve said before, I’ll take such arguments seriously as soon as the people making them start arguing that no Christian churches be permitted within some arbitrary radius of any medical facility, lest women be reminded of Scott Roeder’s religiously motivated terrorism.