Is Robert Lewis Dear the modern day John Brown? That’s not me asking the question, its liberal Jamelle Bouie from Slate, who draws some pretty unavoidable comparisons between Dear and Brown (although Scott Roeder is probably a closer analogy) that cause him some uneasiness. Bouie’s thesis is that the right’s insistence that abortion is the moral equivalence of slavery is leading to the direct logical conclusion that violence is the answer – therefore his prescription is that the right ought to stop drawing the equivalence.

Lost in all this argument over rhetoric and violence is the question of whether the equivalence is valid or not. And if it is, what then? As Ross Douthat noted, once you accept the premise that slavery and abortion are roughly equivalent, you have to ask yourself some pointed questions about whether Brown’s actions at Pottawatomie were justified or not.

From Bouie (with apologies for the lengthy blockquote, please read the whole thing):

Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League voiced his dismay with accusations of blame. “It’s extremely frustrating, and I don’t see anything we could possibly do,” he said. “Like anyone, he’s going to pick up on the news of the day but what he does with the news is beyond our control. I don’t know how we’re going to fight abortion without talking about it.” He continued: “Should William Lloyd Garrison have kept quiet about slavery because of madmen like John Brown?”

That’s a big question. And an important one. Even if it’s an idle comment, by raising the specter of John Brown, Scheidler sheds light on the key tension in this discussion, which goes beyond—but is tied to—the question of rhetoric.

When John Brown led his brutal attack on pro-slavery settlers along the Pottawatomie Creek in southeastern Kansas in 1856, slavery was fully entrenched in American life. Slave-grown exports fueled the American economy, from Southern plantations to Northern industry and speculation. The internal slave trade made fortunes for entreprenuers in Baltimore; Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and other port cities. Roger B. Taney, a pro-slavery judge, was chief justice of the Supreme Court, and pro-slavery Democrats were poised to nominate James Buchanan for the presidency. (He would win, and do nothing to keep the country from war.) And six years earlier, Congress had passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, which fully federalized slave catching. Now, under threat of fines or jail time, state officials and citizens in the North had to return escaped blacks to enslavers and their agents.

Brown looked at the United States and saw an empire of bondage, in deep defiance of God’s will. By the time he took to Kansas, he saw violence as the only thing that might chasten the country and move it from its path. “Without the shedding of blood,” said Brown, quoting the biblical letter to the Hebrews, “there is no remission of sin.”

Brown killed five people at Pottawatomie, all to “strike terror into the hearts of the pro-slavery party.” Three years later—after Taney’s Supreme Court wrote black inferiority into the Constitution—Brown struck at the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, under a plan to arm slaves and spark a mass revolt. For Brown, the United States government had forfeited his loyalty by facilitating—and even protecting—mass evil. If it took violence to force a reckoning, then violence would have to happen. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, I did not wrong but right,” he said, in his final address to the court that condemned him.