Harmful policies gain moral cover when linked to revered reformers

Evidence

In the uplifting comparative exoneration for creating these lethal wares, guns are equated semantically with freedom of speech and linked to just causes fought for by revered social reformers. President of the National Rifle Association Sandra Froman (2007) compared the fight for One time “gun freedom” with George Mason and Patrick Henry’s campaign for a Bill of Rights, Susan B. Anthony’s fight for women’s voting rights, Pasteur’s and Einstein’s defenses of their theories, and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for civil rights. She added the Greek dramatist Euripides and President Kennedy as defenders of free speech. Charlton Heston weighed in with the claim that the Nazi Gestapo were able to persecute the Jews because the Jews lacked gun freedom (“Charlton Heston’s Speech,” 1999). Uplifting comparison bears some likeness to moral justification but differs in how justifications are used. In moral justification, rightness is used directly to turn harmful behavior into good behavior. In uplifting comparisons, the harmful behavior is made worthy indirectly by associating it with revered persons exhibiting moral courage. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 399

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly exemplifies the moral-panic/moral-justification content of ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ where dress-policy defenders likewise invoked revered authorities.
• SEED: Could support an essay comparing how gun-rights and modesty/purity campaigns each recruit revered historical figures (civil-rights heroes, founders) as moral cover.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 399
• XREF: connects to: Uncompromising reformers harm the poor by preventing partial reforms — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 572