PETA... "Have a disease..too bad"
- From: "Chuck" <chuckadams05@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 6 Jun 2005 07:21:41 -0700
"Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be
against it." Such is the "humanitarianism" of animal rights activists."
PETA's Latest Anti-Human Campaign
By Edwin A. Locke
June 3, 2005
Human life versus animal life. This fundamental conflict of values,
which
was dramatized a few years ago when AIDS victims marched in support of
research on animals, is still raging. PETA (People for the Ethical
Treatment
of Animals) has just launched a campaign against Covance, Inc., a
biomedical
research lab in Vienna, VA, that uses animals for drug testing.
It is an indisputable fact that many thousands of lives are saved by
medical
research on animals. But animal rightists don't care. PETA makes this
frighteningly clear: "Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS,
we'd be
against it." Such is the "humanitarianism" of animal rights activists.
How do these advocates try to justify their position? As someone who
has
debated them for years on college campuses and in the media, I know
firsthand that the whole movement is based on a single -- invalid --
syllogism, namely:
Men feel pain and have rights;
Animals feel pain;
Therefore, animals have rights.
This argument is entirely specious, because man's rights do not depend
on
his ability to feel pain; they depend on his ability to think.
Rights are ethical principles applicable only to beings capable of
reason
and choice. There is only one fundamental right: a man's right to his
own
life. To live successfully, man must use his rational faculty -- which
is
exercised by choice. The choice to think can be negated only by the use
of
physical force. To survive and prosper, men must be free from the
initiation
of force by other men -- free to use their own minds to guide their
choices
and actions. Rights protect men against the use of force by other men.
None of this is relevant to animals. Animals do not survive by rational
thought (nor by sign languages allegedly taught to them by
psychologists).
They survive through sensory-perceptual association and the
pleasure-pain
mechanism. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of ethics. A
lion is
not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for attacking a man). Predation
is
their natural and only means of survival; they do not have the capacity
to
learn any other.
Only man has the power, guided by a code of morality, to deal with
other
members of his own species by voluntary means: rational persuasion. To
claim
that man's use of animals is immoral is to claim that we have no right
to
our own lives and that we must sacrifice our welfare for the sake of
creatures who cannot think or grasp the concept of morality. It is to
elevate amoral animals to a moral level higher than ourselves -- a
flagrant
contradiction. Of course, it is proper not to cause animals gratuitous
suffering. But this is not the same as inventing a bill of rights for
them -- at our expense.
The granting of fictional rights to animals is not an innocent error.
We do
not have to speculate about the motive, because the animal "rights"
advocates have revealed it quite openly. Again from PETA:
a.. "Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth";
b.. "I do not believe that a human being has a right to life";
c.. "I would rather have medical experiments done on our children
than on
animals."
These self-styled lovers of life do not love animals; rather, they hate
men.
The animal "rights" terrorists are like the Unabomber and Oklahoma City
bombers. They are not idealists seeking justice, but nihilists seeking
destruction for the sake of destruction. They do not want to uplift
mankind,
to help him progress from the swamp to the stars. They want mankind's
destruction; they want him not just to stay in the swamp but to
disappear
into its muck.
There is only one proper answer to such people: to declare proudly and
defiantly, in the name of morality, a man's right to his life, his
liberty,
and the pursuit of his own happiness.
--
I am too often shocked by the vitriolic repulsion many people feel for
our
leader and America in general, especially because the loathing is often
poorly informed. I've met people on this campus who see America as the
worst
human rights abuser in the world (unlike the angelic paradise of
Cambodia)
and people who sway liberal not because they actually know anything
about
issues but because it's popular.
Liberalism has to be more than a college fad or a collection of
loudmouths
whose idiotic comments stir headlines. The rabid dislike some people
feel
for a man they've never even met makes me ashamed to be a Democrat.
-- Jennifer McBride, Liberal Democrat
Oregon Daily Emerald (U. Oregon)
05/25/2005
.
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