Brave New Bioethics Brave New Bioethics is a series of podcasts recorded by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith exploring the many policies and proposals in bioethics, bioscience, and animal liberation that threaten the belief that human life has worth merely and simply because it is human. Episodes are listed below. Cloning Double Talk Hospice Association Refuses to Denounce Read More ›
Animal-rights and animal-liberation advocacy has, over the years, become a radical and subversive enterprise. To see this phenomenon at work, one need look no further than the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the movement’s leading advocacy group. PETA’s latest campaign blitz, the “Animal Liberation Project” (ALP), is a case in point, blending moral relativism with extremist rhetoric.
It comes on the heels of PETA’s pro-vegetarian “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, which claimed that the worst crimes of the Shoah were morally equivalent to eating meat and wearing leather; that one set off a firestorm of criticism and condemnation from Jewish groups and the media. It took two years, but PETA leader Ingrid Newkirk finally issued a non-apology apology for the indefensible comparison.
But, of course, defend she did; PETA hadn’t changed its mind about the campaign’s essential message. Enter ALP, which again asserts a moral equivalency between using animals and some of history’s worst crimes. ALP’s overarching theme is: “We are all animals.” While this is biologically true, PETA isn’t merely stating a scientific fact. Rather, by the statement PETA means that humans and animals are moral equals. Hence, everything we do with and to animals should be judged morally as if the same things were being done to people.
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 ›
AMERICANS LOVE ANIMALS. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were children. We paste “Save the Whales” bumper stickers on our cars. We groan in empathetic sadness if a squirrel darts into the road in front of a car. We flock to national parks to catch fleeting glimpses of bears, elk, and antelope. We anthropomorphize Read More ›
When many people think of “animal rights,” they may picture trendy celebrities posing in nude photographs to combat the fur industry. Or perhaps, they will roll their eyes and smile when they hear that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reported the California Milk Advisory Board to the FCC for false advertising because its television ads claim Read More ›