Brain-Dead Moral Relativism

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 19, 2025

 

“Moral relativism” is the watchword of the day, thanks to Senator Ted Cruz. He made an example of one of the American right’s more prominent proponents of the notion that there are few ethical distinctions between the United States and its allies and the despotic criminal regimes that are devoted to remaking the U.S.-led world order on their terms.

 

Cruz is engaged in a noble enterprise (albeit belatedly). But when it comes to policing moral relativism, the right is a less target-rich environment than the American left, which is where the impulse to indict America as a uniquely wicked malefactor on the world stage used to make its home. Occasionally, we’re reminded of the status quo ante that prevailed before the right’s thirstiest influencers expanded their critique of the “Republican establishment” to include the works of American statecraft over which they presided (however illogical their preferred shibboleths may be).

 

Thankfully, no matter how broken the influencer set’s moral compass may be, they will still struggle to compete with the left. Indeed, those of us who need grounding in these unsettled times can always turn to ABC’s The View.

 

All it took for the show’s co-host, Whoopi Goldberg, to become visibly agitated was for her to be confronted with the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran mercilessly abuses the minority groups that enjoy protected status in the West. “Let’s not do that!” she insisted, “Because if we start with that, we have been known in this country to tie gay folks to the car. Listen, I’m sorry, they used to just keep hanging black people.”

 

The source of Goldberg’s frustration, Alyssa Farah Griffin, was undeterred by the emotive display. “The year 2025 in the United States is nothing like if I step foot wearing this outfit into Iran right now,” she observed. “It’s the same,” Goldberg shot back. “Murdering someone for their difference is not good, whoever does it.” Life in modern America and the Islamic Republic is not all that different for minorities. “Not if you’re black,” Goldberg insisted. “Not for everybody.”

 

At the risk of gratuitously shaming someone who obviously hasn’t done much thinking on the subject on which she felt qualified to opine, Goldberg deserves to be confronted with a few inconvenient realities. Foremost among them, violence against minorities in America is a crime for which victims can appeal to the state for redress. In Iran, they call that sort of violence “justice.”

 

Iran executes women in obscene numbers, often for “political offenses” and sins against religious dogma. It executes children in similar numbers. It ruthlessly blackmails and coerces the families of the women and children it intimidates, harasses, imprisons, tortures, and, in too many cases, murders so they will keep their dissension to a minimum.

 

“The Islamic Republic allows girls to be married off at 13, and does not protect them from violent and abusive husbands — and then sentences them to death after they commit desperate acts to escape the crimes committed against them,” the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran observed.

 

There are hate crimes against gays and lesbians in America, but there are none in Iran because hate is not a crime. “Our society has moral principles,” said onetime Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in defense of his country’s executions of citizens suspected of violating sodomy laws. “And we live according to these principles.”

 

The Iranian regime maintains one of the most comprehensive domestic terror apparatuses on earth today. It disappears children as young as twelve, some of whom are subjected to “flogging, electric shocks, and sexual violence” in Iran’s torture dungeons. It extorts its citizens into surrendering their assets to the state by holding their loved ones hostage. Those who manage to escape the gruesome confines of torture dungeons like the notorious Evin prison “paint a picture of a regime meting out torture on an industrial scale,” CNN recently reported.

 

“I was given electric shocks at the back of my head, my neck, and my back,” said one survivor. “They slapped me on my mouth and called me a slut and said ‘I am videotaping you so that you can say that foreign media influenced you to come to the street’,” another recalled. “People were beaten so badly, they ended up with broken noses, broken arms or broken ribs,” one activist who languished in an Iranian torture basement for six years. “Whenever security forces tortured people, they were careful not to harm their faces or hands,” said Iranian lawyer Saeid Dehghan. The hands “so they could sign their forced confessions,” and their faces “so that they could appear in court without clear signs of abuse.”

 

If this sounds at all like modern-day America to you, you would do well to log off right now and read a book.

 

The truly soul-crushing part of this is that those who are beholden to the fiction that the modern American state is as, if not more, cruel than the Islamic Republic derive some perverse psychological satisfaction from that demented conclusion. It doesn’t just provide psychological license to disinvest from America’s wholly justified and ethically righteous support for Israel’s war against our shared adversary — an enemy of the U.S., which has spilled far too much American blood over the decades. It allows its believers to conclude that they are keener observers of public life than the rest of us — morally superior, too, in their sophisticated understanding that everything is relative and there are no distinctions worthy of observing.

 

So, yes, Goldberg deserves the shame she’s invited on herself. It’s unclear if she has the capacity to recognize how egregiously she has slandered her country and her neighbors. She may be beyond hope. The rest of us, however, should eschew the temptation toward moral relativism.

 

It’s reasonable (although, I think, wrong) to argue that a military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear weapons program is too fraught a prospect. It’s not reasonable to attempt to avoid making a logical case for that proposition by retreating to the notion that there is no difference between America and the Islamic Republic. The former may be craven. The latter is just dumb.