Raining cats, dogs, and hypocrisy

By Cindy Simpson

Originally published at American Thinker

So many dog stories making headlines these days — might cats be feeling a bit jealous?

A privileged feline named Boots, who "walked from a bizarre death sentence," was the star in this recent post by Professor Jonathan Turley:

Boots was the pet of Georgia Lee Dvorak of Berwyn, Illinois. When Dvorak died, she specified in her will that 11-year-old Boots should be put to death. However, the executor of her $1.3 million will — the Fifth Third Bank — could not get themselves to euthanize the friendly cat. So they went to court and got the language set aside in a rare judicial intervention.

"We didn't want to euthanize this healthy, living animal," said bank senior vice president Jeffrey Schmidt. The judge agreed, and arrangements were made for the cat to be adopted into a "loving home."

"It raises an interesting question of the limits of a person in specifying conditions in a will," according to Turley. "While animals are property, they have more protections than a sofa."

The comments on Turley's post are quite revealing — most in sympathetic support of the bank, the judge, and the cat.

Proper judicial intervention? Or law compromised in the name of compassion? Who can help but note the inconsistency among liberals as to the proper role of the courts, application of the law and privacy rights, and further, the stunning hypocrisy when it comes to regard for the life of a pet versus an unborn baby? In the progressive legal view, both pets and sofas in estates apparently have more protection than do unborn children.

The witty and wise G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.[i]

Substitute "exquisite happiness" with something like "justified," then replace Chesterton's evil of "skinning a cat" with "aborting a baby" — and it becomes evident how society has rationalized the act by simply denying that abortion is a sin that separates man from God.

Now we have Chesterton's "new theologians" supporting a California Planned Parenthood's "Forty Days of Prayer." As PJ Tatler explains, they are "literally making a sacrament of abortion." The "prayers" include thanksgiving for the availability of abortion services, abortion's legality, and the "sacred" nature of the care that abortion providers offer. There are even prayers against pro-lifers. Another "prayer" is offered for "...the families we've chosen. May they know the blessing of choice."

But as asked in this Washington Post editorial: "What about the babies who weren't 'chosen'?"

Planned Parenthood has invoked Orwellian doublespeak: instead of "prayer changes things," "things change prayer."

In further attempts to change the ugly truth, liberals and the mainstream media have labeled the battle to protect religious freedom and the lives of unborn babies as a "war against women." Turley's "2011 Top Legal Opinion Blog" that noted the court's role in protecting the life of Boots the cat posted another column that argues that the men of the GOP (referred to as "male vagina vigilantes") are "trying to gain authority over the opposite sex by taking control of contraception...[sic]and women's bodies."

Yet that same sarcastic post and its author's subsequent comments that fretted over women's "health" and abortion "rights" mentioned not a word about the health or rights of the unborn nor the validity of any opposing legal or moral arguments. Neither did its hundred-plus commenters.

In "progressive" society, the abortion issue is generally not addressed as the gruesome procedure that it really is, and instead framed as the more rights-evoking concept of pro-choice or positive-sounding idea of women's reproductive health. When a baby is wanted, available scientific technology helps ensure its survival; when not, it's merely considered a "clump of cells" or a "punishment" and destroyed, even if it survives a botched procedure. Not only does the solution of "privacy rights" deny Chesterton's cat, it affirms society's imagining that it, and not God, created the life in the first place.

Is our society more concerned with orphaned cats and things like nests of turtle eggs? This summer as families head to the beaches for vacation, many will find themselves banned from certain dunes and areas with fences and signs warning them to keep away. Beachgoers will be urged to help protect the eggs as well as hatched turtles from potentially disorienting lights.

And little girls like this one who might play on that beach believes the world would be a better place if people "didn't exist," having become "eco-indoctrinated" to consider that "trees, rocks, rivers, and animals take precedence over human life."

Dogs, cats, turtles, chickens about to be slaughtered, spotted owls, "endangered species" that liberal environmentalist groups spend millions of dollars studying and protecting and lobbying for — or unborn babies.

People should think about that paradox the next time they hear that a friend or relative is expecting, because they'll likely not receive any "clump of cells," "contents of uterus" or "fetus" shower invitations. Nor would friends send notes of congratulation to a mother who makes her supposedly constitutionally-protected private decision to treat her reproductive health or "fulfill her dreams" by aborting her baby. And instead of "prayers" offered in thanksgiving for abortion clinics, real prayers will ask that God forgives and heals the broken hearts.

The leftists and the media attempt to control life's narrative, but they cannot redefine the truth.

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[i] Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (New York, John Lane Company, 1908), pages 24-25

© Cindy Simpson