I want to start by making it clear that I don’t understand, at all, why anyone would want to ritually kill a magnificent wild animal like a lion, or an elephant, or a feral bearded Socialist Alternative protestor for that matter. In fact, being a gentle type, I don’t even get why some people seemingly get their thrills by shooting guns or letting off arrows in the wilderness. Do it on X-Box if you must. Further, I really don’t like dentists (traumatic past experience), and I especially dislike dentist’s from Minnesota, for no apparent reason. In fact, I’d love to see someone do a mock up of the Blues Brothers clip wherein the quip ‘I hate Illinois Nazis’ is changed to ‘I hate Minnesota dentists’ as some Third Reich wannabees are run off the road and into the river.
But here’s the thing. It sucks that some tool who spends his days sucking stuff out of people’s mouths and drilling out cavities in their teeth, put an end to the life of Saint Cecil, the late lion of the province of Zimbabwe. I’ve no doubt that Cecil is safe now in the arms of a loving Saviour, and has been given a decent funeral that has enabled the many around the world mourning for him to express their grief. As I have already said, I really do hate Minnesota dentists, and have no time for one who makes up for the inadequacy of his manhood by slaying beasts in the wild. But where is our moral compass in all of this? At the same time the world went into a frenzy over the death of Cecil, in the same nation as that which contains the State of Minnesota and its dentists, there has been a week long scandal involving the Planned Parenthood people, who apparently carry out abortions and are happy to on sell the body parts of aborted babies for a profit to interested buyers. If you think that is far fetched, as well as abhorrent, Google it. It’s true alright. The outrage has been largely limited to the existing stable of anti-abortionists.
But you really don’t need to fall into that group, nor be an habitual god-botherer, to consider this is pretty fucked up.
As someone said, somewhere on Twitter, in a place I can’t find again – If Planned Parenthood were selling puppy parts, or the harvested organs of the late Cecil the lion, or the brains of seals clubbed to death in the Arctic… you get the idea… the outrage would be palpable, social media would light up, and PETA would be calling for public hangings, if not a reintroduction of the preferred medieval methods whereby capital offenders, usually those who had threatened the current political power structures, were ritually disembowelled and their body sliced into quarters.
John Donne once famously wrote, “Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” The death of Cecil, majestic lion that he was, has diminished us, and particularly diminished the future income of one Minnesota dentist in particular. But the disturbing and grisly on-selling of the aborted body parts of, yes call it a foetus if you will but it will grow to be a human being if left intact in the womb, this does not diminish us. The deaths of poor Nepalese in mudslides, sleeping in their beds in their flimsy mountainside huts, this does not result in tearful hashtag campaigns to ensure it does not happen again. The ongoing violence, injustice and cruelty in what was once the Republic of Syria, this sinks without a trace on social media in the West. Hardly surprising, really, when the new morality looks to people like Professor Peter Singer for its ‘ethics,’ a man who would even advocate the murder of newborn infants, and who considers a newborn human child as having less value than that of the life of a pig or a chimpanzee. http://www.abc.net.au/…/young-case-against-peter-si…/4199120
I don’t know where Professor Singer stands on selling the baby parts of said infants, but it’s not a long journey from that, to the actions of Planned Parenthood. Like the senseless hunting and killing of Cecil the lion, but only more so, this really does diminish us.