Recently, a referendum in Switzerland proposed that Swiss cantons, roughly the equivalent of American states, provide lawyers to defend animals in animal abuse cases.
The good news is 70 percent of Swiss voters checked the “No” box. It is a disturbing sign of the times that someone thought up such an idea in the first place. This is all part of an unsettling trend, which is not only comical but also potentially lethal.
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer is famous for his veganism. He believes using animals for agriculture in any way is the ultimate sin.
Yet, his radical philosophy also proposes euthanizing the elderly and patients with severe brain damage, abortion in all circumstances throughout the third trimester and infanticide are morally acceptable behaviors. He has also publicly advocated having sex with animals as morally adequate.
You’re probably thinking that this Singer guy is just another obscure nut job professor. Yet he is a tenured faculty member at Princeton and has sold millions of books that were translated into dozens of languages. Most animal rights advocates own a copy of Singer’s bestseller “Animal Liberation.”
We live in a world where one of the most prominent public intellectuals believes that drinking a glass of milk is murder, but killing grandma, throwing babies into trash bins and making whoopee with a goat is morally OK. What the hell is wrong with this picture?
In the ancient world of paganism, where gods resided in natural objects such as animals, suicide was seen as an ennobling practice and infanticide was universally practiced. Only did the rise of Christianity overturn this ugly moral order.
More recently, a certain art school reject from Austria deeply influenced by Germanic paganism became a radical vegetarian. Yet his disregard for human dignity resulted not only in war, imperialism and genocide, but also the mass euthanasia of those with disabilities and the elderly – those people Singer thinks killing is peachy.
In “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” Diane Ackerman writes about a Nazi scientist who was punished for failing to properly anesthetize an earthworm before experimenting on it.
Although the Swiss referendum first made me laugh, this is no laughing matter. The growing rejection of Judeo-Christian ethics by certain parts of society is creating a potentially dangerous situation.
It is no coincidence that Switzerland is also the home of legalized euthanasia and a hotspot of “suicide tourism.”
Animals aren’t humans and will never be equal to them. Nor can they be above them, because that is exactly what is implied when animals get the rights that increasingly people with disabilities are denied.
I sure wouldn’t want to live in a country whose laws were written by Peter Singer. But millions of undergraduates worldwide are exposed to his way of thinking, and unquestionably many of them will be the political leaders of tomorrow.
This has dangerous political precedent. And coming from a family that greatly suffered during World War II, I wouldn’t want Singer’s readers to produce wanother Hitler.