Animal Torture v. Human Torture

I personally don't care whether Michael Vick is reinstated to the NFL or not. For one, he's not very good. And second, well, who cares.

But the arguments for keeping Vick out are really interesting. Peter King at Sports Illustrated prints some of the e-mail responses after he said Vick should come back. One of them gets at the heart of a lot of the outrage toward Vick:

"He's a dog torturer. He has no room in our society let alone our favorite sport. He should be banned for life.'

That's interesting because whereas Vick was roundly condemned for torturing dogs, we have an entire political party saying it's OK to torture human beings in secret prisons with no accountability.

Now I think torturing dogs is terrible. Animal rights are important. I had an uncle (now-deceased) who abused animals and I would have had no problem with him serving some time for it. But what does it say about our society when torturing animals is a far bigger deal with far more moral condemnation than torturing people?

The Decline and Fall of the SCLC

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference declined into irrelevancy soon after the death of Martin Luther King. Ralph Abernathy proved unable to steer the SCLC ship into a relevant future, in no small part because the civil rights movement found itself rudderless without King and without a clear agenda. The movement never regained its power in this country. Major players such as Jesse Jackson and John Lewis are still around and active, but as a whole, the mainline African-American civil rights movement has followed organized labor into political irrelevancy.

This decline is certainly not helped by the SCLC's embrace of Michael Vick. I'm not sure what they see in defending Vick. It's true that many African-Americans see the treatment of their sports heroes like Vick and Barry Bonds as part of a broader racial war against them. We can't ignore those sentiments because they are grounded in truth. But they are also somewhat wrong-headed. No one is going after Vick because he is black. They are going after him because he fights dogs.

There are a million issues for the SCLC, NAACP, and other civil rights organizations to work on. African-Americans still receive a raw deal in this country. Police brutality, poverty, drug use, unequal education, housing that is desegregated in name only, etc., etc., are deeply important issues. To subsume these issues in order to defend a millionaire athlete who enjoys blood sports seems wrong-headed at best.

Via Good Nonsense.