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Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.
Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".
https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932
What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?
I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?
I mean, I think some of it is that there is some level of specificity when considering the symbolic meaning of something, such that "reversing the roles" doesn't always scan.
To use an example, when Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to congress in 2007, he was sworn in on Thomas Jefferson's Quran. I think in a year when 9/11 was still fresh in everyone's mind, and Muslims were our main boogeyman, the intention of that was to signal that even though he was Muslim, he considered himself American and wanted to tie himself to a founding figure of America to make that clear.
Despite this, conservatives like Denis Prager still managed to find something to complain about it in the affair, pointing out that before Keith Ellison, everyone from Jews to atheists were willing to swear their oath of office over a Bible, and so Keith Ellison should have been forced to do so as well.
Except, honestly, I think those Jews and atheists were kind of wrong to swear an oath on a book they didn't believe in. It's kind of weird that in considering the reversal, Denis Prager effectively says, "I would rather an elected official start their time in elected office as a liar and a hypocrite, as long as they swear allegiance on my tribe's book."
I am reminded of the case of Charles Bradlaugh in the UK, who was elected to the UK parliament, and spent six years repeatedly refusing to take a religious oath and was thus refused his seat, only to be re-elected in every by election that followed. Eventually, he took the religious oath, but in a way, taking the oath after six years of very clearly stating he did not believe a word of it, and subsequently being seated actually showed how meaningless the oath was. They didn't care if they were being knowingly and blatantly lied to, as long as the proper ceremony was being observed. An honest man, they refused to seat for six years. A liar and a hypocrite they happily seated, and in doing so undermined any credibility that the oath all of them had taken could be taken seriously.
Perhaps an oath has some power in heaven, though the swearer does not believe in it.
The idea behind an oath is that you're consciously making a promise with God as a witness, implying that there is a divine obligation to tell the truth. The reason, as @vorpa-glavo points out that some Christians, most notably Quakers, forbid swearing oaths, is that their existence implies a double-standard. In other words, to swear an oath to tell the truth implies that you might lie absent the oath, and you should never lie. This actually became a serious problem in early Pennsylvania, when a government run by Quakers found it difficult to operate in the broader context of a legal system that required oaths for various things. The workaround is the affirmation, whereby one keeps God out of the equation and just reaffirms that he's telling the truth now, the implication being that he always tells the truth and is doing so here as well. I believe Franklin Pierce is the only president who affirmed his oath of office, and the option is theoretically available.
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I don't think that's what Christians believe about oaths. Generally, I think they just think it shows a person is trustworthy and follows the same values as them.
There are even some Christian sects that take Matthew 5:35-37 as forbidding Christians from swearing oaths:
Based on that, if oaths have power in Heaven, it is in strengthening Satan.
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