REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Animal Crackers
An Ivy League professor defends bestiality.
Remember Irving Kristol's famous crack that the only question a liberal would have when presented with an 18-year-old girl having sex on stage was whether she was being paid the minimum wage? Well, Peter Singer has taken this a step further. In an online review of a book that takes on the "taboo" against bestiality, Princeton's DeCamp Professor of Bioethics says that when it comes to sex with farm animals, the only real issues are whether you get the animal's consent--and you don't kill it as part of your pleasure. Which, of course, is consistent with Professor Singer's key ethical contention: that the belief that human life has an inherent dignity higher than animals is mere "speciesism," a "prejudice no better founded than the prejudice of white slave-owners against taking the interests of their African slaves seriously."
Back in 1998 when we first tussled with Princeton President Harold Shapiro over Mr. Singer's appointment to the university's ironically named Center for Human Values, Mr. Shapiro maintained the issue was not whether one agrees or disagrees with Mr. Singer, but "the power of the professor's intellect and the quality of his or her scholarship and teaching." Presumably, the university's faith in this power and quality has now been vindicated by the aforementioned review of Midas Dekkers's "Dearest Pet: On Bestiality."
Do not take our word for it. Read it for yourselves (www.nerve.com/Opinions/Singer/heavyPetting/) on a Web site whose mission statement proclaims its intention "to be direct with both word and image in this space, whether the result is flushed faces, genitals, or perhaps just reflective thought." The words might have been written by Hustler's Larry Flynt, who has written of his own first sexual experience--with a chicken whose head he then lopped off. Clearly Princeton's idea of scholarship has evolved in the time between, say, Woodrow Wilson and Mr. Shapiro.
These are the people to whom America is to defer on issues ranging from federal funding for fetal-tissue research and human cloning to non-therapeutic research on human subjects?
Unfortunately for the new Administration, decisions on these issues are coming fast and furious. Already the Bush HHS has suspended a last-minute Clinton regulation that would have deemed a newborn a "fetus" (and hence more eligible for research) until it could maintain independently "a heartbeat and respiration." And in October we wrote about another last-minute deal, this one an Agriculture Department settlement of a lawsuit aimed at extending protection to the mice, rats and birds that constitute 95% of animal research in laboratory experiments. If left to stand, says the National Association of Biomedical Research, the settlement would effectively regulate animal testing out of existence by raising the price and creating intolerable paperwork to document every single rat, mouse or bird used.
Our own view is that far from constituting threats to man's dignity, our advances in science--such as the mapping of the human genome--hold the potential to enhance it. And on the frontier where man's intellect meets his soul there will not always be agreement, whether that has to do with animal testing or human cloning. But surely that doesn't mean that the idea of unique human dignity should be treated as mere prejudice. We'd like to think Mr. Singer's latest musing on the pleasures of bestiality for a smart-alecky sex site has come as a tremendous embarrassment to professional ethicists. The greater scandal here is that it hasn't.
