The hypocrisy of the anti-AR right

I follow a few lists about animal-related legislation both because it's an interest of mine and because, obviously, it's a great place to get story ideas and keep up with things happening in other parts of the country.

And I know I should post a bunch of background here, and remind you of past posts I've made here and on Pet Connection about how aggravated the assumption of right-wingitude makes me -- in other words, the wide-spread acceptance of the entirely false idea that anyone who supports the preservation of working dogs, hunting dogs, and heritage dog breeds is a right winger.

Not true. What is true is that the whole issue of shelter reform has arisen out of a truly non-partisan pool of those who care about what's really best for animals, and about forging unconventional coalitions and throwing all the old polarized positions out as pointless and unworkable. This isn't a right vs left issue, and allowing the whack jobs at PETA to frame it that way is abdicating the very real progressive position on both individual freedom and true animal welfare to those same whack jobs.

Some of us have stood up to take back the progressive movement for shelter reform and real animal welfare, but you wouldn't really notice that on a lot of these lists.

And never has this been more clear to me as I watch a little army of pseudo-libertarians falling all over themselves in glee at the selection of right wing ideologue Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Why? Because she's anti-AR and pro-hunting and fishing, of course. And they're all dancing around about this (even though in reality most Democrats are, in fact, anti-AR and pro-hunting and fishing, but that's not the "frame" we've been sold so they just ignore it), and neglecting to note the simple fact that Sarah Palin is not a libertarian and she's not interested in your freedoms and she's not about respecting our values or our beliefs.

No, she may be all for your choice to eat mooseburgers that you shot yourself, but she's violently opposed to a woman's right to have autonomy over her own body, or to use her mind to decide for herself when she thinks protoplasm becomes a person. If there's a more virulent anti-choice fanatic in this country, the only place you'll find them is outside a clinic putting firebombs in doctors' cars.

Hypocrites. You want your right to your guns -- which I support -- and your hunting and fishing -- which I support -- and to breed dogs and eat meat and all the rest, but you'll dance on the grave of my right to choose what happens to my own body, and make my own medical decisions.

Nice work.

Comments

[Alex]

Interestingly I was just watching that Season 6 Episode of The West Wing where the Republican candidate is searching for a running mate and the sticking point is always, always abortion. Somehow people who spend a lifetime campaigning for 'traditional' sports (it was always fox hunting in the UK which was finally banned but the outcry over it has never quite gone away), 'traditional' freedoms and the rights to use every other person and animal as they choose seem to totally against the right to control one's own body, lest it result in sleeping with someone of the same sex (cos that's everyone's business, obviously) or by aborting a foetus.

Abortion's an emotional issue and I have about a million questions to answer for myself before I'm certain about issues like when the cut-off date should be, etc. But no matter what my questions and doubts it's just not in me to deny another sane, adult human to make a choice about their own body. The choice of Palin was depressing to me in the UK because we often follow where the US leads, and it was a manipulatively smart choice. Let's hope the US turns to the route back up the garden path Dubya lead us all down.

[Lee Charles Kelley]

Just a proofreading note: "whack job" (with an "h") is not the proper spelling for your purpose in this article. It should have been "wack job," as in "those people are wacky."

"Whack job" sounds like an assignment a mafia don would give to a hit man: "I want ya to whack dis guy for me, okay?"

LCK