Human Exceptionalism

It was bound to happen. First, proponents of the culture of death brought us physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Now, we must contend with IAS – Internet-assisted suicide. Yes, you read right. As reported by Julia Scheeres in the June 8 San Francisco Chronicle, suicide promotion and facilitation has entered cyberspace. In “A Virtual Path to Suicide,” Scheeres demonstrates how indifferent to Read More ›

For many years, the bunker-buster in the pro-assisted-suicide arsenal has been its supposed inevitability. Pointing to multiple public-opinion polls showing support for assisted suicide generally in the high 60-percent range, euthanasia advocates claimed that only a rigid, religiously motivated minority – e.g., Catholics – was keeping Americans from accessing the “ultimate civil right.” Soon, they cheerily predicted, the anti-assisted-suicide medievalists Read More ›

The animal-rights/liberation movement (ARL) will never win an award for truth in advertising. If the facts serve their cause, yes, they will tell the truth. But if a half-truth or even an outright lie better suits their purposes – well, what does honesty matter when the cause of ending human hegemony over animals is so important and just? Perhaps the Read More ›

IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear that the bio-anarchists leading the charge to Brave New World want a virtually unlimited license to engage in human cloning. The proof is in the legislation they keep trying to pass. It is bad enough that in Washington, senators Orin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have introduced the Human Cloning Read More ›

PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has finally and unequivocally come off the rails. Attempting to convince us to become vegetarians, the anti-human advocacy group has mounted a new public relations campaign asserting that the eating of meat is the equivalent of the torture and slaughter of Jews by the Nazis.This odious message isn’t insinuated subtly between the lines. Read More ›

The animal-rights/liberation movement is living high on the hog these days. In the last election, for example, activists induced Florida voters to grant gestating sows a state constitutional right to be kept in a space large enough to turn around in. As a consequence, the two pig farms in the state that had used gestation crates to confine pregnant pigs Read More ›

There is an old folk wisdom: “You are known by the company you keep.” As is true of most folk wisdom, the saying has much to recommend it. To use an extreme example, if you hung out with and financially supported a known terrorist, most people would reasonably think that you were a terrorist too. Which brings to mind the Read More ›

When President Bush selected bioethicist and author Leon R. Kass to head the President’s Council on Bioethics, many were outraged. Kass, a critic of human cloning, was accused of being a Luddite who would use his position to stack the council deck against “scientific progress.” But that is not how Kass viewed his mandate. He envisioned that the council would Read More ›

A wise man once said, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” That is good advice, especially for stories that involve assisted suicide. Take the media’s reporting about the lawsuit between the State of Oregon and United States Attorney General John Ashcroft (Oregon v. Ashcroft), which has generally been abysmal. With reporters generally looking with favor upon legalizing assisted Read More ›