If your memory reaches back to usenet, you'll recall Godwin's Law, that the longer a thread grows the more likely it is to heat up and, as it flames, the odds of someone getting compared to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis approach one. Godwin's Law held that, when that happened, the argument was over and the one making the comparison had lost.

If we hadn't already known it, we've recently found the American corollary to Godwin's Law in rhetoric on the American Right. Perhaps they learned it from the Left, but it's interesting that the thread doesn't grow long before the slavemaster is invoked these days. Alan Keyes's attack on Oback Barama's position on abortion is the most public instance of it. On the net, Clayton Cramer defends his anti-gay rhetoric by invoking the slavemasters' sinister influence."... whatever the libertarian theory is in favor of treating homosexuals like everyone else," says Cramer,

the enormous threat to civil liberties that they insist on imposing on the rest of the society makes them dangerous. They are like slaveowners in antebellum America: few in number, but rich, arrogant, and powerful, because of their internal political cohesion. Their sexual behavior (at least if they can stay away from children) isn't the biggest hazard; it is the corruption of the political process that they cause in their effort to suppress dissenting opinions, through anti-discrimination laws, through their attempts at shutting people up.

Query: Does Governor James McGreevy's resignation tend to confirm or refute Cramer's charge? Or is it beside the point? A tip of the hat to CrescatSententia. Update: As one might expect, Clayton is grooving on the McGreevy story, but there's something voyeuristic about all this.