Alison:

I’m not sure what “slur” you refer to, or who “us” is. If you mean my comments about the psychological processes apparent from the argument I criticize above, I take it you think it’s insulting or hyperbolic to “equat[e] propagandizing with clinical insanity”.

Let me say first that I agree that it’s offensive to use references to mental illness as a slur. But I don’t think that’s what I was doing here.

First, I didn’t literally impute a clinical diagnosis to Kevin Burke. I did, however, mean it literally – not figuratively, and not as “merely” a slur – that he does not appear to employ rational and reasonable mental processes in thinking about the issue at hand, and that this is characteristic of people who share his positions on those issues. Perhaps I’m being too critical, but the constant level of egregiously bad thinking – of fallacious reasoning and factual travesty – that consistently characterizes right-wing rhetoric on social issues, particularly related to women’s sexuality, to my mind, seriously calls into question their mental capacity for thinking about such issues at all. In this case, no normally rational person could seriously imagine the things Burke writes. And he is not simply engaged in propaganda; he actually seems to believe the things he writes. Assuming that is true, it is difficult not to think that the mental processes leading to such beliefs have gone very wrong somewhere. None of which is literally to say that he merits an Axis II clinical diagnosis – only that he is, in a colloquial sense, loopy as a fruit bat, and so are a great many people like him.

I think it’s both fair and important to point that out. The kinds of things he says and believes are hurtful and destructive; they must be countered and defeated. And one of the things most wrong with Burke’s writing is that it is simply irrational – the obvious product of deranged thinking. It does not merit a reasoned argumentative response – it merits a big sign on it that says “Hey – this is bizarrely irrational!”

I understand that the word “insane” carries a sense of slur for many people. I meant it in the colloquial sense also, but perhaps it was insensitive to do so. I admit to being ambivalent about its use – I don’t agree that it’s a slur in the same way as, say, racist or homophobic terms constitute slurs; the word “insane” and its cognates can be quite literal descriptive terms (as in this case), and usefully so. (Are we supposed to pretend the kinds of things Burke writes are not insane?) But I am also not the one most hurt by its use, if it is understood as a slur, and so I may not have the right to dismiss those concerns. I am sorry to give offense, but I have to say again I’m not sure where to come out, in the end, on the use of terms such as that.

Too bad.

Equally as absurd a charge as her being some kind of “victim” of “abortion culture”, but just as plausible.

Why not?