(UNDATED) If Harry Truman were alive today, he might be surprised to learn he was a Nazi — at least according to some overzealous contemporary political activists.

Truman, of course, was president when Nazi Germany was soundly defeated by America and her allies. He was also a champion of universal health care.

President Obama seems an unlikely Nazi as well. As the child of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya, he is poorly positioned to be a torchbearer for championing the doctrines of white racial superiority and purity that the Nazis used to ride to power.

Nevertheless, some protesters at congressional town hall meetings on health care reform are carrying placards with swastikas and pictures of Obama with a Hitleresque black mustache. Radio talk show hosts have compared the current administration to the Nazi regime, implying that universal health care is a Trojan horse for the practice of eugenics and euthanasia.

For me, the escalating and overheated rhetoric causes considerable concern.

Just over a year ago, a man walked into the sanctuary of my church and opened fire with a shotgun, killing two people and injuring six others. His stated goal was to kill liberals who he felt were destroying the country. Books in his home indicate that this unstable man was a consumer of the overheated rhetoric of our culture wars. Some people, unfortunately, take this kind of talk deadly serious.

The tenor of the health care debate has gotten so bad that the Anti-Defamation League — an organization whose goal is to combat anti-Semitism and work for racial understanding — issued the following statement: “Regardless of the political differences and the substantive differences in the debate over health care, the use of Nazi symbolism is outrageous, offensive and inappropriate.”

The current efforts at reforming health care have set the goal of extending coverage to the estimated 42 million Americans, including 10 million children. How this is synonymous with the practices of a genocidal regime that murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, and millions more in World War II, is left to the imagination of those paying any attention at all to this debate. Sadly, some people have very active imaginations.

Our country needs a debate on the issues, not the demonization of political adversaries. To participate in the debate is appropriate; to disrupt it is not. To speak out is valuable; to listen, even more.

(Chris Buice is minister of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tenn.)