Answers to Life’s Questions: Part 4

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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More answers to some commonly asked questions.

1. Are Rosie O’Donnell’s opinions dismissed out of hand because she is a lesbian?

No. Rosie’s opinions are dismissed out of hand because they are stupid.  Her sexual orientation has nothing to do with it.

To the best of my knowledge Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton and Cindy Sheehan are not gay.  But whenever they speak, we all need to suppress the same urge to regurgitate our last meal that frequently occurs whenever Rosie pontificates on fire not being able to melt steel, or how the US attacked itself on 9-11.

2. Doesn’t every opinion have a right to be heard?

No.

Opinions are like the exit point of the human digestive system; everyone has one.  Some opinions reflect an informed judgment on an issue.  Others are, to put it as kindly as possible, stupid.  Not only do stupid opinions not have a right to be forced upon us, we are doing a great public service by ignoring them.

3. Why is Michael Vick in trouble?

Michael Vick took a harmless, defenseless, innocent life and killed it without any reason, other than that life was an annoyance to him.  He acted as judge and executioner all rolled into one.  There were no appeals, no pleas for mercy, no thought about the future that innocent life could have had with a loving, caring family. 

He’s a dog killer, which is the lowest form of humanity in the eyes of the press — next, of course, to being a Conservative or Republican. Had Vick stuck to voicing his support for, or actually participating in aborting human babies, he would have been a hero, because everyone knows that a developing child is not innocent life worth protecting.  But kill a puppy, and it’s the Seventh rung of Hell where no mercy or redemption is possible for such a heinous act.

4.  Does the government have a responsibility to subsidize art?

In the 1930s, during the height of the Great Depression, the Federal government employed a number of artists and writers to help ease the country’s unemployment crisis. Their work was subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, and was the beginning of a long history of federal, state and local subsidies for the arts.

Today, it is taken for granted that public money should fund everything from National Public Radio to an exhibition of cow-turd macramé in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.  As one died-in-the-wool liberal proponent of this policy explained it to me a few years ago, “Give children guns, teach them how to shoot under the guise of hunting for sport, but don’t teach them about the beauty in Art or give them greater access to Art.  And this makes sense how?  I bet federal funding for gun appreciation would be okay.”

Excuse me for a moment while I pause from responding to urinate into a glass, drop in a religious icon, and call it “Art.”  No, better yet, it can’t really be “Art” unless I get some of your tax money to buy the glass and enough beer to get that mellow, rich glow to my urine.  The “beauty” in Art can only be recognized if the government makes someone else pay for it.  And no one has the right to question whether my glass full of human waste or canvas full of cow turds is Art.  Is this a great country, or what?

By the way, just to set the record straight, we do have federal funding for gun appreciation, and it’s something I fully support.  It’s called “basic training,” and every U.S. soldier who defends a liberal’s right to be a complete and total ass takes the course. 

5. Do animals have the same rights that people do?

In the West we might love our pets and treat them like family, or drive around with Animal Friendly license plates to show our solidarity with them.  But in other parts of the world they routinely eat the same thing I just played fetch with.  Cute or not, it’s a meal that feeds a family of five, not counting leftovers.

If dogs don’t invoke a universal feeling of cross-species solidarity, what about something genetically closer to man?  Certain apes not only possess many surface similarities with man, but we also share a lot of the same genetic code.  Is it at this level man and nature unite to provide animals with inherent rights equal to those of man?

Once again, in the West we may treat monkeys better than, say, Frank Purdue does chicken.  But we still cage them and experiment on them.  While our domestically grown enviro-Nazis get equally upset about experiments conducted on lab rats or chimpanzees, the late Tammy Faye Bakker and millions of other American women could care less if the latest shade of eyeliner was tested first on Bonzo’s eyeball, as long as they think it makes them look attractive.  That number rockets even higher when you throw in animal research on serious diseases in the hope that the next Christopher Reeve can get out of his wheelchair and walk again, to recreate the imagery of John Edwards.  And this doesn’t even begin to address how these supposed human-cousins are treated in other parts of the world.  Monkey brain pate is not a cute name for tapioca pudding in parts of Africa, if you catch my drift.  Even if we don’t eat them or experiment on them here in the U.S., we still don’t treat these animals the same way we treat our children — not even the really obnoxious ones!

And yet, some people have espoused the notion that dogs and monkeys and other animals have rights just like humans do.  They advocate laws that recognize these alleged rights. Dog owners become dog stewards or dog guardians or some such designation. Because human beings are not monolithic, we can always find cases here and there of bizarre ideas and practices.  However, while it may seem like a worldwide animal-rights movement is starting to take off — requiring moral Relativists to give serious thought to an emerging world consensus that "animals are people too" — I need only remind you of two things.

First, San Francisco is not the world, regardless of how much air time these idiots get on NBC.  And second, even if everyone in the world thought the same way they did, it wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference when drawing a conclusion about whether animals have “rights” just like humans do.

Even though I may love my dog more than say, Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton, I can still tell you with absolute certainty that if Rover and the worst excuse for human debris were trapped together in a burning building and I could only save one of them, I’d be looking for a new puppy as soon as I recovered from my burns, not to mention the shock that I’m the guy responsible for Howard or Hillary still showing up on TV.  Substitute a brain-damaged human being in a vegetative state lying in his own filth who was probably going to die in a week anyway, and it wouldn’t make a difference.  Rover would still be toast, literally and figuratively.

Even a supposedly worthless (in the eyes of the mainstream media), brain-damaged, bed-ridden woman like Terry Schiavo has more intrinsic value than the smartest, most wonderful, rarest, most precious animal on the planet.  That person was created — literally or metaphorically — in the image of God.  Whether she was born that way or became that way makes no more difference to me in recognizing her intrinsic human nature than focusing on the color of another person’s skin, or any other physical attribute you choose.

I ask those of you who think that animals are just a less sophisticated form of human life, deserving of the same equal rights and protection under the Constitution enjoyed by all adults and non-aborted babies, to consider one final thought. Fred stealing my credit card is not the same thing as Rover grabbing my wallet and burying it in his favorite backyard stash.  One’s a thief who has the ability to reason, think symbolically, understand moral concepts of right or wrong, and act or not act in accordance with them. The other is an animal.  Not just because he smells really bad and has manners like a pig, but because no matter how much we like to think that “the kitty is smiling at me” as my young nephew once said right before it attacked him, an animal has no ingrained morality or a soul.  All it has is instinct and basic animal intelligence. 

And possibly an owner with an overactive imagination.

Politics: General

Read more articles by Phillip Ellis Jackson