REVERENCE FOR LIFE

As reverence for and protection of human life has declined in the “developed” nations over the past century; there has been a concomitant increase in the reverence and protection of animal and plant life in the “developed” nations.  Whether this phenomenon is the result of a deterioration of belief in Christian teachings, or the evolvement of “secular-progressive” tenets that point toward a pagan or atheist communism-type future of government-dictated beliefs is open to question.  There is even a line of thought that these contrary trends in our concepts of human life as contrasted with animal and plant life are simply two sides of the same coin and that those responsible for devaluing human life and elevating the status of all other animal and plant life are one and the same.

If this latter is the case, then the conscious or subconscious agenda at work may be the propaganda effect of playing the contrived motives for one movement as justification for the other.  What I mean is that if human life is merely tissue to be ruled by governments, isn’t “man” therefore the “same” as other animals and even plants?  If government determines that there are “too many” people or that the elderly are “too expensive” or that there should be wolves or buffalo (or elephants or crocodiles) where people now live, isn’t that a decision for government to make?  Since governments are man-made entities and are periodically, if not always, under the influence of powerful groups or autocratic individuals: isn’t it legitimate that government can support whatever is desired by those in charge to reduce the human population and conversely to increase the numbers of and distribution of animals and plants?  Clearly this line of reasoning has grown as we have witnessed the diminishment of the value of human life (government support for abortion, embryo destruction, mercy-killing, court-ordered starvation, etc.) and the elevation to quasi-religious treatment of plants and animals (legislation and treaties for Endangered Species, Animal Welfare, Marine Mammals, Wilderness, Native Species, etc.).  Remember the Terry Schiavo debacle the next time you see coverage on the evening news of a beached whale or a bear that has wandered into some urban yards.  Don’t be reluctant to mention that if anyone tries to say that these opposing trends are not related in some perverse fashion.

Yesterday was the 24^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by the US Supreme Court.  This morning I opened the Washington DC paper to a full page ad with pictures by Animal Rights International objecting to: “Pigs” “raised totally indoors”; “Chickens” “crowded by the tens of thousands into dim sheds, never getting to go outside”; and “Beef cattle” “eating corn, for which their stomachs are not suited”.  As I sipped my coffee and stared at these concerns, on the heels of the anniversary of millions of government-sanctioned abortions, my thoughts wandered back to the 1930’s and birth control and Adolf Hitler.

Early in the last century it became fashionable to support eugenics, the practice of preventing births of “inferior” humans while encouraging births of “superior” humans.  Among other things like population control of “inferior” “races” and the poor, formerly rejected practices such as castrating and sterilizing “the retarded” and “criminals” were approved by the US Supreme Court.  Birth control, a universally forbidden (by Christian Churches at that time) practice, was challenged as birth control clinics in poor neighborhoods by eugenics advocates were opened as “reasonable” steps to limit “undesirables” and the “criminal class”.

Prior to the early 1930’s birth control was considered a serious moral transgression (i.e. a serious “sin”) by all Protestant Churches and the Catholic Church: at the 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops approval of the use of contraceptives was granted to members unless birth control was for “selfish, luxury, or mere convenience” reasons.  In less than a decade, birth control was tolerated and accepted by all Protestant Churches as this gaping moral exception enticed everyone including  “inferiors”, “superiors”, “rich”, “poor”, “criminal”, and practically all others to embrace what had been made acceptable by church rules.  Clearly, when there was public acceptance of sex as something other than an expression between husband and wife that might result in a child: sex took on the aura of legitimacy that it was to be enjoyed for its own sake alone.  While secular-progressives might rightly point to centuries of prostitution and “closet” activities as simply being legitimized thereby: there is no argument that we crossed a watershed with this toleration that has led to all the “cultural decay” and “social issues” that concern us in the “developed” nations today.

In less than a decade from that Lambeth Conference as nearly every Protestant Church accepted the practice of birth control a glimmer of the emerging emotional objections regarding what some would call the “abuse” of animals was publicized in Austria by a national political leader.  After assassinating the Austrian Chancellor and then invading Austria (Anschluss) shortly thereafter in March of 1938, Adolf Hitler triumphantly entered Linz, Austria “whose streets he had wandered in solitude so many evenings” as John Toland reports in his definitive biography of Hitler.  Hitler reportedly went “to the Hotel Weinzinger. The proprietor had given up his own suite, whose main room was filled with stuffed animals.  Hitler, who detested hunting, several times stumbled over the head of a polar bear.”  Later, when he proceeded to Vienna, it was reported that he refused to stay at the finest hotel there because the lobby was also filled with mounted animals that were always popular with the Austrians that had a strong hunting tradition and culture.

This account of Hitler’s aversion to hunting is perhaps the most stark example of these recent conflicting trends regarding the devaluing of human life and exalting of animal and plant life phenomenon.  Here was a megalomaniacal political leader already embarking on the killing of millions from the “insane” and political opponents to Jews and gypsies and slavs and other “inferiors” while expressing revulsion about hunted or “stuffed” animals.  Additionally by this period the Nazis had propagated government orders about who could live on farms, how many farms there were to be, AND their intention to re-establish Pre-Roman (i.e. Teutonic/Germanic) plant and animal communities.  With “warp speed” the elimination of human dignity and the enshrinement of government-dictated rural living standards and what plants and animals were to be given government priority literally became law simultaneously in Nazi Germany.

The last 60 years in western society may be characterized in may ways: Cold War; Vietnam; UN; declining Church attendance; soaring rates of out-of-wedlock births and divorce and couples living together outside marriage; “emerging” group rights and privileges for feminists, same-sex attracted people, and a long list of “minorities” are but a few of the major threads different people might point to as important or as triggers for other things.  Let it suffice to say for our purpose that the threat of communism to the developed nations necessitated both more powerful central governments in the west and increased reliance on UN auspices and agreements.  These led to a European Union concept to accompany NATO as the US federal government began a steady expansion that incorporated domestic power expansion based on federal land acquisition, treaties, federal funding to states, and a curious lack of concern on the part of the electorate as state and local authorities and jurisdictions eroded and washed into the federal stream.

In this societal milieu of change many things were challenged: gun control proposals and incremental law changes aimed to erase the 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution by simply having a judge interpret it differently; school authority shifted upward from local jurisdictions to federal bureaucracies; likewise road construction and maintenance were more and more dictated by federal bureaucracies that distributed a large share of the available funds.  The point here is that citizens steadily became inured to federal dictates and more and more “new” federal laws.

In the 1970’s in the midst of the US pullout from Vietnam and on the heels of an eruption of public drug use, social protests, and “free” love: the US federal government enacted several concepts that were truly revolutionary and have since evolved in ways that were not foreseen or anticipated.  In 1973 the US Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that a woman has a constitutional right to abortion based not on words in that document but on “penumbras” and “emanations” thereby voiding state authority in this area to be replaced with federal jurisdiction.  Overnight, what had been murder of an unborn child became a constitutional right involving only tissue.  In 1976 the US Congress passed and President Ford signed (in the aftermath of the Vietnam collapse, Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation, and in anticipation of running for President in the upcoming election) The Endangered Species Act, The Marine Mammal Protection Act, and The Animal Welfare Act, each of which granted rights and protections to wild and domestic animals that Roe had only recently withdrawn from unborn children.

A word about the interest groups behind these actions is in order.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act named “sex” as a factor like “race” as something that could not be used as a basis for any discrimination.  As “feminists” organized like race-based groups to empower themselves, the rallying call and perhaps the most important and earliest “right” women demanded was a “right” to abortion or as it was euphemistically called the “right to control their bodies”.  These feminist groups allied themselves with other movements that called for more radical social changes and these alliances persist to this day. Two of the most numerous and powerful such movements are the environmental movement and the animal rights movement.  To this day, these groups meet together often; attend each other’s conferences; and utilize interchangeable staff, lobbyists, and lawyers. 

The environmental and animal rights movements are made up of hundreds of organizations and activists from your neighbor that wants to keep a local stream clean to the organizations wanting to eliminate hunting and logging and on to the vicious radicals like the mysterious Environmental/Animal Liberation Fronts that burn up houses or attack employees of companies that use animals in medical experiments.  These movements are also made up of multi-billion dollar entities like The Nature Conservancy (whose ex-President is now Secretary of the Treasury) and little known anti-farming and anti-energy groups as well as large and powerful lawyer/lobbyist combines like The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Council on Biological Diversity.  While the feminists and their social allies push abortion and expanding what it has spawned: in combination with these environmental and animal rights combines, they are a genuine political juggernaut of money and political influence advancing complementary agendas.  Other groups join in periodically as their causes intertwine such as doctors advocating stem cell uses or groups wanting access to organs for transplants.  All of these groups offer politicians the full gamut of support for their re-elections and they work intimately with federal bureaucrats that benefit from annual budget increases and increased salaries and retirements as federal authorities “expand”.

In fact the “gay” lobby and the gun control lobby also participate with the above groups and share many of the same goals.  For instance, as women have “advanced” and “protected” “their” rights, so too are many gay activists proceeding politically and legally: just as so many environmental and animal rights objectives aim to destroy any animal use, so too do the aims of anti-gun groups complement and benefit from the drives to destroy hunting and trapping and ranching and constitutional rights by court decisions. However, let us set those movements and their relationships to a Reverence for Life aside for another time.  Instead, let us focus on what has evolved from and since the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion and contrast that with what has evolved from and since the 1976 passage of those three “watershed” environmental/animal rights laws.  Let us also include the Wilderness Act that coincidentally was passed in 1964, the same year as the Civil Rights Act, but really began to become continuously active in the 1970’s down to the present as these other laws and their increasingly powerful backers led the way.

In fact I could fill pages with lists, much less explanations, of environmental and animal rights changes in US society in the past 30 years that parallel the changes in the status of human life protections in this period.  For purposes of brevity and clarity, what follows is a listing of changes resulting from Roe v. Wade and a listing of some of the major changes resulting from the environmental/animal rights legislation.  Recognize that while the cause and effect are not always clear, these results represent the end of a hodgepodge of laws, amendments, regulations, court decisions, and the federal purchase of state bureaucracies and Universities with federal funding and the ever-present “strings”.

AS A RESULT OF ROE v. WADE:

-         Abortion went from authorized for up to three months to six months to 9 months to partial-birth to current recommendations by an Ivy League professor to allow parents to euthenize children up to six months old if they are deemed to not have worthwhile life (just like the Nazi eugenics rationale).

-         Lives not worthwhile to justify such murder are first mentioned for handicapped children to eventually include conditions like a cleft palate.

-         Schools have been given the right to take children for abortions without notifying parents.

-         Schools distribute birth control information and products to increasingly younger children.

-         Schools explain sex without moral values to children that then encourages both sexual activity and deviant sexual experimentation. 

-         “Assisted” suicide as practiced in some European nations is being attempted in the US.  Doctor determinations are soon regardless of the wishes of patients or their guardians.  Life for the aged or the terminally ill, like the unborn, is increasingly unprotected under the law.

-         The “Terry Schiavo” case marked a new low as the Court used armed police to enforce the starvation of a woman in spite of the protestations of her family and their offers to care for her.

-         Human embryos and fetuses are so devalued that destroying them routinely for artificial insemination purposes and stem cell purposes is becoming less and less a case of ethical questions and more a case of simple utility.

-         Cloning of humans is increasingly proposed as no different than cloning a sheep or a horse.

-          Drugs that kill the fetus are developed and made available to everyone desiring them.

-         Governments increasingly claim the right to harvest your body and organs when you die unless you specifically object.  As government can disregard any claim to protect you as an unborn child: so too may government claim ownership of your body and organs when you die.  Death being defined by a government bureaucrat and determined by a doctor intending to use you and your organs.

Lest the above incomplete list of horrors disturb you, next we can feel “good” about what government is doing for the environment and animals.  Again the list is but a shadow of what could appear but it is mainly to contrast with the list above.

AS A RESULT OF ENVIRONMENTAL & ANIMAL RIGHTS LAWS:

As a result of the Endangered Species Act –

-         Wolves and grizzly bears are forced by federal fiat into more and more states where they kill dogs, livestock, game herds, and people causing, among other things, school bus stops to now include cages for the children.

-         Rural economies are decimated as claims about animals and plants enact land use controls that destroy not only rural ways of life but families and traditions.

-         Private property is taken without compensation which when added to the annual purchase and set aside of more US land as federal property makes the reach and impact of the federal bureaucracies on behalf of their benefactors more and more destructive.

As a result of the Marine Mammal Protection Act –

-         Whale populations of certain species that are exceedingly high and are decimating commercial fishery stocks are left uncounted, their impacts undocumented, and their management precluded indefinitely.

-         Seals populations that are decimating salmon and cod and lobster fisheries worldwide are not only protected and undocumented as to numbers and distributions and impacts; their management and even their impact on water quality and private property like boats goes unmentioned and is ignored.

-         No marine mammal is managed or used in American jurisdiction.  They enjoy the full protection of the law.   Why?  Because they are “cute”?  Because they are “smart”?  Because they are “better” than the unborn or the aged or the ill or those not deemed to be capable of a “worthwhile” life?

As a result of the Animal Welfare Act –

-         The regulation of the use of animals for medical or other experimental purposes was expanded from chimps all the way to rats and mice that sponsors always denied would happen.  The resultant record keeping and zealous law enforcement has resulted in most drug testing being transferred overseas to of all places China.  Aside from the huge loss to the American economy, questions of reliability for human health purposes loom large but go unmentioned.

-         A current federal proposal to bring all pets under federal jurisdiction waits passage at a time opportune for election purposes. 

-         A new federal law prohibiting horse owners from selling unwanted horses for slaughter now must be followed up with a federal law prohibiting the sale of a horse to Canada or Mexico where the horse might be slaughtered or used in a way that might offend some Americans sensibilities such as in a rodeo.  Would that the government would provide the same level of concern for all Americans, no matter their health or age or social status.

As a result of the Wilderness Act (and other such inviolate public land closures) –

-         Fires of increasingly fierce magnitude kill people and destroy homes and communities.  The reason is the fuel build up and closure of access and roads over these increasingly large areas where no management of the forest resources is allowed.

-         Incredibly damaging fires, as in Southern California and elsewhere, are blamed on “winds” and “homes where they don’t belong” rather that the lack of management of the plants and provision for fire fighting.  This is similar to blaming deadly attacks by protected bears, wolves, and cougars on the victim’s behavior or on their “being in the animal’s habitat”.  It is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for setting fire to Rome.  Such specious arguments are nothing more than government propaganda but are accepted as valid by many people.

-         “Native Ecosystems” and “Wilderness” propaganda and photographs take on the quasi-romantic stature of battlefields and places where historic events took place.  We are told that they are intrinsically valuable even though they are off limits to the vast majority of people (old, handicapped, very young, busy, etc.) and their designation precludes the uses and access that supports communities, families, and individuals.  They, like their newest facet Marine Sanctuaries, simply return us to the pagan history of ancient times where vast areas were “sacred” and as long as they were worshipped and kept off limits, human society and families suffered.

These short lists should make my point understandable. 

-         As abortion services are more available: whales and seals are given absolute and total protection despite their harmful impacts and potential value, when properly managed, to human society.

-         As the debate goes on about murdering children under 6 months old: wolves and grizzly bears are protected and spread to kill pets, livestock, game herds, hunters, children, and soon others and school bus stops are built to protect children from government wolves.

-         As Terry Schiavo is starved to death under armed guard: rural residents are arrested by armed officers for shooting a wolf or grizzly bear in their yard or camp for insufficient reason.

-         As old people freeze because of the high cost of heating fuel: government moves to proclaim that northern ice cover MAY decrease and so to eventually protect already protected (Marine Mammal Protection Act) polar bears that MAY be less populous, than their current high numbers, someday.  The result of this action added to the refusal to develop energy in the US under federal lands is criminal in the sense that the old and the poor are very disproportionately harmed in addition to the more affluent that, while affording higher fuel prices, are simply sending money to despotic regimes that harbor people that would destroy this country (men, women, and children) if given the opportunity.

-         As the old are euthenized either publicly or privately we laud more Wilderness and Roadless designations with an indifference to the impacts on rural American families that is shameful.

-         As we ship drug testing to China and contemplate a federal health system that has only proven to make things worse elsewhere in the world: we complain about the “cost of drugs” and the “cost of keeping alive the aged and infirm and handicapped”.

I believe that these two things (devalued human life and sanctified plant and animal life) are as intertwined as breeding snakes.  Understanding this is important as we elect officials and as we advocate remedies for current distortions in laws and in society.  Speaking about this without being vulnerable to charges of extremism is no small matter but we must all be willing to speak about these things if we are to set our nation back on course to where human life is revered for its intrinsic worth and animals and plants and our environment are treated as the human complements they were and are meant to be.

Jim Beers

24 January 2007

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