A North Carolina Republican lawmaker on Wednesday compared former President Abraham Lincoln to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during a debate on Facebook about current events.
Cabarrus County Rep. Larry Pittman had been debating Facebook followers about a new bill to ban same-sex marriage that he and two other lawmakers recently sponsored in the General Assembly.
In one of the comments, a user told Pittman “the Civil War is over. The Fed won. Get over it.”
“And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it? Lincoln was the same sort of tyrant, and personally responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional,” Pittman wrote.
In a week tremendous #PRfails, allow the #NCGA‘s own Larry Pittman to overshadow them all. Gay marriage, Hitler and Lincoln. Perfection. pic.twitter.com/5Oh1nU8jVm
— Kevin Rogers (@kevinjohnrogers) April 12, 2017
While estimations about the number of people killed during the Civil War put the figure around 620,000 to 750,000, thus making Pittman’s statement inaccurate, the issue with his statement was the comparison of a beloved U.S. president to a dictator who murdered millions of people in the late-1930s and early- to mid-1940s.
“Representative Pittman and his ultra-conservative allies in the General Assembly have no sense of decency, no sense of shame and no sense of historical fact,” North Carolina Democratic Party chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement.
Earlier this week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at a press conference that even Hitler didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons” in World War II compared to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Spicer later apologized on CNN and clarified his statement.
