At 02:40 PM 6/14/04 -0400, you wrote:
On Monday, June 14, 2004, at 02:04 PM, Will Linden wrote:
Or if in 1967, the excommunication of Leander Perez has been preceded by a presidential colloquy seeking papal support for civil rights campaigns. (Sorry, but for years I have been driven up the wall by increasingly incoherent responses on why That Was Different).
It is different because substance, not just process, matters. The coherence or lack thereof of an analogy or distinction is based not merely on the formal structural components of what is being compared, but also on the substance of what is being compared. Depending on one's substantive values, an analogy or distinction will be more or less persuasive. To you an analogy between the unborn and the fight against slavery may seem obvious. But to find it compelling one must ignore the vast array of substantive differences between the two settings. From the other point of view, the distinctions between the two may seem compelling, but that too requires either ignoring the important similiarities or choosing to favor the distinctions over the similarities.
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