April 29, 2012
Raining Cats, Dogs, and Hypocrisy
A privileged feline
named Boots, who "walked from a bizarre death sentence," was the
star in this recent post by Professor
Jonathan Turley:
Boots was the pet
of Georgia Lee Dvorak of Berwyn, Illinois. When Dvorak died, she specified in
her will that 11-year-old Boots should be put to death. However, the
executor of her $1.3 million will -- the Fifth Third Bank -- could not get
themselves to euthanize the friendly cat. So they went to court and got the
language set aside in a rare judicial intervention.
"We didn't want to
euthanize this healthy, living animal," said bank senior vice president
Jeffrey Schmidt. The judge agreed, and arrangements were made for the cat
to be adopted into a "loving home."
"It raises an
interesting question of the limits of a person in specifying
conditions in a will," according to Turley. "While animals are
property, they have more protections than a sofa."
The comments on Turley's
post are quite revealing -- most in sympathetic support of the bank, the judge,
and the cat.
Proper judicial
intervention? Or law compromised in the name of compassion? Who can help
but note the inconsistency among liberals as to the proper role of the courts,
application of the law and privacy rights, and further, the stunning hypocrisy
when it comes to regard for the life of a pet versus an unborn baby? In
the progressive legal view, both pets and sofas in estates apparently have more
protection than do unborn children.
The witty and wise G.K.
Chesterton once wrote:
If
it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in
skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two
deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do;
or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians
do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution
to deny the cat.[i]
Substitute
"exquisite happiness" with something like "justified," then
replace Chesterton's evil of "skinning a cat" with "aborting a
baby" -- and it becomes evident how society has rationalized the act by
simply denying that abortion is a sin that separates man from God.
Now we have Chesterton's
"new theologians" supporting a California
Planned Parenthood's "Forty Days of Prayer." As PJ Tatler explains, they are
"literally making a sacrament of abortion." The
"prayers" include thanksgiving for the availability of abortion
services, abortion's legality, and the "sacred" nature of the care
that abortion providers offer. There are even prayers against pro-lifers.
Another "prayer" is offered for "...the families we've chosen.
May they know the blessing of choice."
Planned Parenthood has
invoked Orwellian doublespeak: instead of "prayer changes things,"
"things change prayer."
In further attempts to
change the ugly truth, liberals and the mainstream media have labeled the
battle to protect religious freedom and the lives of unborn babies as a
"war against women." Turley's "2011 Top Legal Opinion
Blog" that noted the court's role in protecting the life of Boots the
cat posted another column that argues that
the men of the GOP (referred to as "male vagina vigilantes") are
"trying to gain authority over the opposite sex by taking control of
contraception...[sic]and women's bodies."
Yet that same sarcastic
post and its author's subsequent comments that fretted over women's
"health" and abortion "rights" mentioned not a word about
the health or rights of the unborn nor the validity of any opposing legal or
moral arguments. Neither did its hundred-plus commenters.
In
"progressive" society, the abortion issue is generally not addressed
as the gruesome procedure that it really is, and instead framed as the more
rights-evoking concept of pro-choice or positive-sounding idea of women's
reproductive health. When a baby is wanted, available scientific technology
helps ensure its survival; when not, it's merely considered a "clump of cells" or a "punishment" and destroyed,
even if it survives a botched procedure. Not only does the
solution of "privacy rights" deny Chesterton's cat, it affirms
society's imagining that it, and not God, created the life in the
first place.
Is our society more
concerned with orphaned cats and things like nests of turtle eggs? This
summer as families head to the beaches for vacation, many will find themselves
banned from certain dunes and areas with fences and signs warning them to keep
away. Beachgoers will be urged to help protect the eggs as well as
hatched turtles from potentially disorienting lights.
And little girls like
this one who might play on
that beach believes the world would be a better place if people "didn't
exist," having become "eco-indoctrinated" to consider that
"trees, rocks, rivers, and animals take precedence over human life."
Dogs, cats, turtles,
chickens about to be slaughtered, spotted owls, "endangered species"
that liberal environmentalist groups spend millions of dollars studying and
protecting and lobbying for -- or unborn babies.
People should think
about that paradox the next time they hear that a friend or relative is
expecting, because they'll likely not receive any "clump of cells,"
"contents of uterus" or "fetus" shower invitations. Nor
would friends send notes of congratulation to a mother who makes her supposedly
constitutionally-protected private decision to treat her reproductive health or
"fulfill her dreams" by aborting her
baby. And instead of "prayers" offered in thanksgiving for abortion
clinics, real prayers will ask that God forgives and heals the broken hearts.
The leftists and the
media attempt to control life's narrative, but they cannot redefine the truth.
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