I used to love dogs. I really did. I didn’t love dogs the way some people on Facebook love them. Maybe these dog-lovers were dogs in their past lives, if past lives make any sense whatsoever in the big scheme of things.
I see people showing pictures on Facebook of them kissing and cuddling and curling up with their dogs, and also writing ecstatic words of love to their furry little and big friends. I do not knock their deep and abiding love for these creatures, even those weird little Chihuahuas that (hard though it is to believe) we created from noble wolves. If dog lovers love “Butch,” or “Whimpy Woodle,” or “Peggy Pugnose,” hey, that’s their thing. The fact that some dog-lovers actually sleep with these carnivores is somewhat strange don’t you think?
I had a great dog, Sam, a Golden Retriever, who was mild-mannered, relaxed, loving and gentle (she had to be gentle since my two little boys –played really rough with her). I have to say I had really fond feelings towards that animal. If there is reincarnation Sam is now a person whose picture is on Facebook cuddling her dog.
But something changed in me over the years. My tolerance level for a dog’s stench, their drool, their constant slobbering just became too much. And it all became summed up in a dog called Cheney, my son and daughter-in-law’s attempt to have a pet before they had the ultimate responsibility – two beautiful children.
Since both of them worked, Cheney was brought up by himself. He was a huge Golden Retriever, weighing close to 100 pounds. He was largely unschooled. He smelled like crap mixed with bad breath and a hint of death. Unfortunately, he also thought of himself as a lap dog. He’d leap on you if you sat on the couch; his ass in your face and his tail wagging against your cheeks as if he was slapping you. Man, you needed a gas mask to survive the odor.
At dinner, the beast would hide under the table and if you turned your head to talk to someone his tongue lashed out like a lightning bolt to suck up whatever you left unprotected on your plate. (“Hey, what the hell happened to my steak?”) His tongue was like those frog’s tongues that shoot out about a yard to catch some poor flying insect.
Cheney was not fun to be around. His farts were awful. They could depopulate a native village.
Cheney put the finishing touches on my love of dogs. Now I just tolerate them – and, to be honest, I often can’t stand them. I do not, however, wish them any harm nor do I wish their human lovers any harm either.
And that’s why I just don’t understand dog lovers who are pro-abortion or, as they call it, pro-choice. They love these smelling, drooling, slobbering beasts but babies don’t connect with them. I write this because a ferocious dog lover I know is a leader in the pro-abortion movement. It is almost like a religion with her; a religion only surpassed by her love for her dogs – a smelly lot. Her pictures of her dogs are all over the Internet too. She even does dog rescue. In her mind humans were created in the image and likeness of the divine being – Dog. (God spelled backwards.)
I am not saying that the dog lovers who are pro-abortion do not love babies that have finally struggled out of the womb; many do love the little imps and many more tolerate them despite the fact that the little lovelies poop and spit up and drool and burp and fart, just like their dogs. But for some weird reason when a baby is inside a womb, they make all manner of silly excuses to remove the kid’s humanity from him or her. That allows them to kill the little one with lack of conscience.
I read a long (intolerably long) essay by some lawyer (not my cousin Maria or Margaret) expounding on all the reasons why a fetus was not a human being. Essentially it all boiled down to not being out of the womb or able to live on its own. (I don’t know one infant who is able to live on his own, do you? Even a new born dog can’t live on its own.)
The need to strip a human of his/her human qualities allows us to kill that human with no stirrings of our conscience. I understand that. I also understand the need for us to so label those we wish to kill. Jews were defined as less than human by Nazi’s, so why not kill them? They are annoying vermin and many of them are communists, more vermin, so exterminate them and goosestep into the future to create the fourth Reich. You can make a list of all the people throughout history who were defined as non-people which then gave the “real” people the right to kill them.
There is no doubt that societies determine who can be put to death. A society that defines who can be put to death defines that death as “not murder,” just killing. The Catholic Church which now sanctimoniously opposes the death penalty had a blast putting witches and heretics to death throughout the middle ages.
The laws of Moses prescribe the death penalty for a ton of infractions. (Most people are not aware of this fact.) Indeed, the commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Murder,” not “Thou shalt not kill.” How could it be otherwise when in later laws the death penalty is given for various offenses? The death penalty is killing. All the wars Yahweh engaged in were killing. Ask the Egyptians if killing of their first born was killing. I think they would answer yes. But killing is not murder.
That is essentially the argument of pro-abortionists. A fetus is not a human in the human sense as we define humanity now. It can be killed. Society states that the killing of such a fetus is not murder. I do not agree with diminishing the humanity of a child inside a womb. I realize we are allowed to kill it but I prefer giving the little thing the benefit of being a person and not some vermin.
Our society in the form of the Supreme Court says that killing a baby in the womb is just fine; it is not murder. If a woman needs to get an abortion then she can get one. But please do not try to pretend it is just killing some cells or other. You are killing a human being. You are allowed to do that in our society, which is absolutely true, but don’t give the song and dance that the baby is just something of an “other” as opposed to a human because it is not crying, crapping and flopping outside the womb.
In short, I believe we should recognize the humanity of a baby in the womb. Pretending otherwise is just pretend. Early on the lawyer who wrote the interminably long article used the number of cells in the baby to define what a human was; then he went to lack of full brain development (hey, we don’t get our adult brains until 25 years of age – or so – and that’s why teenagers are so maddening); and then he used the “in or out of the womb” treatise. The guy was all over the place in his effort to dehumanize the baby so we could be comfortable killing it.
Why bother to do any of that? Just say that in our society we can kill babies in the womb and be done with it. Let’s not do what other societies have done and fall back on the primitive but seemingly lasting idea that those we can kill are somehow less than the rest of us; in short those we can’t kill because they are not less than us. I prefer reality to illusion in the case of abortion. I prefer it in the case of the death penalty too. A criminal we decide to kill is not being murdered by us, just killed. He’s still a person.
I prefer an honest discussion of the abortion issue without the flim flam of attempts to create definitions that lack substance. We have the right to kill that baby, fine; just don’t say it isn’t a human being.
And give your slobbering, smelly pooch a hug for me.
[Read Frank’s book Confessions of a Wayward Catholic! Available on Amazon.com, on Kindle and other electronic media, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.]