15 People Who Should Have Thought Twice Before Using Slavery To Make A Point

This is never a good idea, people.

1. On the national debt.

"Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due — and this isn’t racist — but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master." — SARAH PALIN

2. On abortion.

“If you go back to Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, he looked at the Civil War as a sort of a national penance for slavery; the evil of slavery and letting it go on. And the founders knew how bad it was. We have other things in this country today and abortion is one of them." — KEN CUCCINELLI

3. On being cruel to animals.

“Child labor, human slavery, and the oppression of women all came to be opposed by our society, thanks to the passion and hard work of human rights activists. We hope that PETA’s display will help people see that nonhuman animals suffer today just as humans once did, and that we can all make small changes in our lives to help make animal oppression a thing of the past." — PETA President INGRID NEWKIRK

4. On eating animals.

"Eating animals is like slavery — it has to end now." — PETA associate director MIMI BEKHECHI

5. On gay marriage.

"The advocates of slavery in the United States often attempted to justify that institution by denying black people their share in human nature. On this account, they pretended that the notion of unalienable rights did not apply to black people, and that they therefore had no rights government was obliged to respect and secure. In like fashion, the advocates of homosexual so-called marriage now seek to deny the nature of marriage." — ALAN KEYES

6. On Obamacare.

"Obamacare is really the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. It is slavery, in a way." — Dr. BEN CARSON

7. On abolishing collective bargaining.

"Collective bargaining is something that is so close to slavery in terms of abolishing it, that it is not an American concept to tell people that they cannot discuss their economic position." — REP. CHARLIE RANGEL

8. On paying taxes.

"Someone did the math, and it came to around $600 million. And I sit here before you trying to figure out how to pay a tax debt? If that's not like enough to slavery, I don't know." — LAURYN HILL

9. On the fossil fuel industry.

"Frankly, the amount of money that's on the line, the only historical analog for the amount of money that’s on the line, in terms of the fossil fuel industry, is the sum total value that the slaves represented in the Civil War. That is the analogy you have to go back to when you think of the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books of the current fossil fuel companies. The last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War." — CHRIS HAYES

10. On wearing fur.

"There’s no difference, in my opinion, [between fur and] slavery or the Holocaust." — NIA LONG

11. On college football.

"NCAA football is modern-day slavery." — LUTHER CAMPBELL

12. On playing in the NFL.

“It’s modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too.” — ADRIAN PETERSON

13. On working for the UFC.

“Umm, I know I thought slavery was over a long time ago.” — TITO ORTIZ

14. On the war on drugs.

“This whole thing of…this ‘War on Drugs,’ and the mass incarcerations that have happened pretty much for the last 40 years has just decimated the black male population. It’s slavery…it’s just slavery through and through, and it’s just the same fear of the black male that existed back in the 1800s.” — QUENTIN TARANTINO

15. On breastfeeding.

"It's both a joy and a kind of slavery." — NICOLAS SARKOZY