Cruelty to animals certainly isn't something to be ignored or upheld but some American activists certainly seem to have their priorities upside down. Human life consistently seems to be getting subordinated to the value placed on fish, owls, bears and the like.

The latest examples of this topsy-turvy logic involve a U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning religious animal sacrifice and an advocacy group's efforts to get the Chinese to stop using bears in medical research.

At the same time, the U.S. government continues to promote and fund programs that advocate and assist in the slaughter of millions of unborn human babies in the world's abortion mills.

Sometimes, ironically, it is the same people who demonstrate for "abortion rights" and "freedom to choose" who are vociferously dogmatic about any infringement on an animal's "rights."

In Miami Beach, that city passed an ordinance barring animal slaughter, even for purposes of religious sacrifice. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Miami's ordinance unconstitutional.

Just imagine being a faithful Jew two millennia ago and living in Miami. The daily sacrifices of the Old Testament, commanded by God, would have been illegal.

On the other hand, the ancient pagan, idolatrous practice of burning one's children in sacrifice to the stone deity Molech probably would pass muster in our strange-thinking society.

What is the matter in a society that puts more value on a snail darter than human progress? Where is the logic in stopping medical research that could save human beings untold suffering and death to save a Chinese bear from the embarrassment of having some of his internal fluids siphoned off into a test tube?

For a hundred years now, many in our world have not seen the need to challenge the ideas of godless evolutionary theories. Some Christians even have sought to make the Bible and evolutionary thought compatible.

But one of the results of accepting that we emerged from primordial ooze to evolve through animal stages to our current position is the comical present where many are willing to treat a bobwhite with as much or more care than a baby.

You don't see college students and animal rights advocates marching in parades and blockading or burning buildings to force the government to do something about drunk driving deaths or aborted babies or the growing incidence of rape. But you do see them doing those things to stop people from wearing fur coats or to protest a laboratory's plans to inject some rats with cancer agents as they test new medical technologies.

You see, to one fully sold on the evolutionary theory and its consequent philosophies and anti-theologies, a rat is as important as you.

And why not? Human beings stripped of souls really wouldn't be any different from a minnow, a weasel or a wasp. In fact, Darwinian theorems make them our relatives of the long past.

So, we as a nation are at the bizarre threshold of idiocy. We pass laws to protect what God has given us to eat and clothe ourselves with and we pass other laws to permit the killing of that which is most valuable next to the unseen soulhuman life.

Are we through with the insanity? I don't know. I'm waiting for the "vegetable rights" and "insect advocacy" groups to emerge and then I want to see what vegetarians do for food and whether we begin building new malarial swamps.

Am I being silly? Most certainly. But friend, I'm certainly not alone.

Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 1, p. 13
January 6, 1994