Not for the squeamish: PETA and human exceptionalism

[the contents of this post can be highly offensive: read having been cautioned]

The Alliance Defense Fund linked to an article yesterday that appeared in the online version of the weeklystandard. The main content concerned a public debate that is happening in the state of Washington with respect to beastiality. The debate has been ongoing for many years but recently heated up because of a man that died while engaging in his perversion. There are no laws in Washington against beastiality.

The reason I draw your attention to this vile behavior and the articles in the weeklystandard is because of the impact in the public square that groups like PETA and other environmentalist extremists can have. When they make statements like, "We are all animals" that go unchallenged and become part of the fiber of culture they inadvertently or with a degree of calculation give acceptance and rationality to blatant sin. The latest case in Washington is beastiality as normal. Not only normal, but anyone who argues that it isn't morally acceptable to copulate across species and to hold a belief that humans are exceptional simply for being human are guilty of "speciesism." Specieism is discrimination against animals.

Now I fully hope that anyone reading this post will see and declare the utter folly of such discrimination. But in the arena of ideas in the public square when one engages in the logic and thought processes of groups like PETA one begins to trample upon sacred ground. What I refer to is the theological truth that we are created in the image of God. No horse, no cow, no cat, no dog was made in His image. We are exceptional because of that not just simply because we are human.

No one I know or speak to wants to needlessly use animals for tests that are abusive and cruel to animals. And I do believe that such tests occur and they ought not. But to open the door to PETA and ideas like "specieism" is intellectually vacant. A Christian worldview cannot include such vacancy. Think about it and begin to engage PETA and the like with a consistent worldview.

[a local example of my guilt as a person who suffers from specieism: I love the bumper sticker some have where I live that reads, "PETA = People Eating Tasty Animals
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