Bragdon counters opposition to teen labor proposals

Analyzing the article

The Wall Street Journal

red herring

straw man

Our Analysis: 2 Fallacies

At least three Republican-led states have made it easier for teens to work in 2023, joining more than a dozen others that already had smart policies—including blue states such as Oregon. The overreaction to these common-sense reforms points to a political motivation. Op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post have decried the horrifying dangers that children will now face. MSNBC runs segment after segment about the GOP’s campaign to “make child labor great again.” The endless media drumbeat features Democratic officials at their bleeding-heart best, replete with grainy black-and-white pictures of scrawny, starving children. They give the impression that 8-year-olds will be working the graveyard shift, freezing to death in meat lockers, and losing limbs in the local coal mine.

¹The message couldn’t be clearer: Suburban moms should vote for Democrats, or else Republicans will kill their kids. ²Strangely, no politician or pundit has acknowledged that Democrats want to let teens change their sexual identity and get abortions without parental consent.

1. Straw man • The sources cited above, though they make arguments against the proposed laws, do not make argument that "Republicans will kill kids."

2. Red herring • This statement introduces new topics argumentatively (parental consent for sex change and abortion) without establishing their relevance to the original topic. It also is a sweeping generalization fallacy: in saying "Democrats want," it characterizes all Democrats, when actually there are many Democrats who do not want these things. Also, with some audiences it functions as a guilt by association fallacy, in that these topics are among the most unpopular policies of Democrats.

References

Tarren Bragdon (2023, Oct 20). Democrats Peddle a 'Child Labor' Deception.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/antifamily-democrats-peddle-a-child-labor-lie-parental-rights-florida-47da84eb

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Disclaimer

Note that there being one or more apparent fallacies in the arguments presented in this article does not mean that every argument the arguer made was fallacious, nor does it mean there are not other arguments in existence for the same or similar position that are logically valid. Also note that checking for fallacies is not the same as verification of the premises the arguer starts from, such as facts that the arguer asserts or principles that the arguer assumes as the foundation for constructing arguments. For more about this, see our 'What is Fallacy Checking?'

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