It doesn’t matter if the intended consequences of your action are good if in the end all you do is hurt people.
It’s irrelevant if he cares or doesn’t, it’s not like you can only be fascist if you purposely decide to adopt it in a concious manner.
You may be confusing this with being objectively good, and to be sure, these are good things. But people are only as good as they know how to be, they believe that feeding the hungry is good so they feed the hungry, they believe that banning abortion is good so they do that. I don’t mean to say that people who are against abortion are fighting evil by fighting abortion, rather they are for being good by fighting abortion. That’s what being pro-life is. It’s something you can see others recognize in you as good. Pregnant women and babies are only in the way of being pro-life, which is believed to be good.
You don’t need to pretend he’s a good guy to sympathize with him, and you certainly don’t need to defend his actions or sing his praises to keep the line of communication open. In fact, this is a trap because it means you’re dealing with someone from an imbalance of (I hate to use the word) power, because you’re tip toeing around his assumptions as if he couldn’t put two and two together and figure out you’re condemning him. The thing you have to fight is not the person, its the belief. You don’t have to say, “Youre a good person, but this thing you are doing is pure evil”, you have to say “The pro-life movement is flawed”, the hting you need to erode is not your step father’s beliefs, it’s the culture that informs his beliefs.
Frankly speaking, most of us don’t deal in original thoughts, we usually think in talking points and converse with other people in the language and thoughts of the day. This means that attempting to reason with someone about irrational beliefs is doomed for most of us who are not especially persuasive when making original rational arguments, because we will likely only use our talking points, things we haven’t reasoned for ourselves, that we’re right is an accident, not a virtue.
That’s my adivce, stop fighting the man and fight the culture that informs him.
