officially printing and taping to my wall. good quote!

Problem is, with the right wing extremist media that has become the network norm, we would never even know about MLK today.

Look at the coverage of protests at the recent Republican Convention in the Twin Cities. That's right, WHAT COVERAGE? The police eliminated "with extreme prejudice" the protestors (including pre-emptively locking some up) and beat & threatened journalists that tried to cover the attempted protests. This stuff should have been on the 6 o-clock news.

CNN, which FOX accuses of being the most "liberally biased" among the major newscasters, had no coverage of the protests.

So what does that tell you about the other network newscasters that are "further right" than CNN?

Yep: we are living in a time of extreme right-wing journalistic bias.

(Re-submitted using quotes instead of greater-than and les-than signs. My bad.)

"What right do you have to force your lifestyle choice onto me?"

"Force?" No one's stealing your meat and dairy and force-feeding you vegan food.

What right do you have to force your lifestyle choices on animals? And I mean really force, as in killing them, mutilating them, confining them, stealing baby calves from their mothers, cutting the toes off turkeys and the beaks off chickens and the horns off cows - or rather paying someone else to do this for you. What right do you have to harm others for pleasure? (Assuming you make your own food choices and are not living in a remote log cabin in Alaska, eating animal products is a choice, not a necessity.)

Should we revoke animal cruelty laws so that people can leave their dogs tethered on a leash all day in the hot sun with no water, or engage in violent dogfighting, because it wouldn't be right for animal activists to force their lifestyle choices on others?

"I don’t care if you are a vegan or meatatarian like it or not for you to eat something has to die."

Every vegan knows this. However, through our choices, we can make huge differences in both the number of animals we kill and the amount of suffering we cause.

"Every commercial farm that grows soybeans for your oh so tasty vegan burger excludes animals by fence and uses lethal means of animal control outside (animal damage permits). I know this because I am the person who issues these permits in my area. So unless you grow EVERY morsel of food you eat some group of animals was killed for you to have your bocca burgers."

This has been covered in FAQ pages for the last 30 years, but I'll repeat some of the basics:

- Most of the grain grown in this country goes to livestock, and in nearly all cases far fewer plants are required to support a vegan diet than a diet that includes meat and dairy.

- Animals grown for food nearly always endure much human-caused suffering before they're killed. Chickens are grown to be so obese they often die of heart attacks or collapse when only one month old. Male pigs, bulls, and other animals are castrated without painkillers. Breeder turkeys are essentially raped every two wweeks. Male chicks at hen hatcheries are ground up alive. Prior to slaughter animals may be starved for up to four days. And so on.

- Slaughterhouses are filled with violence that is simply not matched at a broccoli farm.

"Just so you know PETA has facilitated more animals deaths than me!"

So has nearly any open-admissions animal shelter. Ignoring the fact that many of the animals killed by PETA were slated to be shot or drowned, or that PETA used relatively painless methods of euthanasia...You can always find someone who's worse than you. May I suggest instead trying to lower your negative impact on animals and the earth, and endeavoring to refrain from inflicting avoidable harm to animals, specifically killing them because you like the taste of their flesh or female secretions. Explore vegan options; they're quite amazing and diverse these days. Give that an earnest try and I can nearly guarantee you that you'll feel great about your decision and won't be bothered at all by animal advocacy efforts.

We also know that terrorist MLK Jr. justified rioting:

"The riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met; and it has failed to hear that large segments of society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity."

"Kathy, I assume you are a vegan? What right do you have to force your lifestyle choice onto me?"

Refraining from harming others is not a lifestyle choice. It is an ethical imperative that is ingrained in our laws and our most basic moral precepts that descend from the Golden Rule. The animal rights movement is simply asking for consistency in our behavior. We treat brain-dead humans with more dignity and possessing more rights than self-aware language-using chimpanzees. I can't think of any ethical theories, not rooted on blinded faith, that can justify such a mean-spirited disparity.

If you want to dispute the idea of the Golden Rule and want to ascribe to something resembling Social Darwinism or "might makes right" - do so overtly. But don't be inconsistent and say that some sentient beings deserve protection but others don't due to their biological classification. That is naked bigotry and in time, admittedly a long time, it will be seen as such.

"There are 2 things on this planet producers and consumers, plants are producers and everything else is a consumer."

You say your job is environmental protection. That worries me. Your views on ecology are just plain wrong. Even my elementary kids are taught that there are, at a minimum, consumers, producers, and decomposers. Emints.org says that this is 3rd-6th grade level education. Here's some K-6 study guides that can maybe help you Joe:

http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S000016...
http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/mnstep/activities/2...

In any case, this is largely irrelevant, because human societies have long since proven that they will not be bound by ecological determinism. We search for cures for malaria rather than accepting malaria as an ecological fact and dealing with the consequences. We don't accept the idea that we should not have age of consent laws because the age of 14 is when human females are the most fertile.

Just because we have evolved to become the most powerful species on Earth - a claim that I don't dispute - does not mean we are ethically justified to act like tyrannical despots over the environment and other sentient beings.

That is, unless you subscribe to a mean-spirited egoist philosophy of "fuck everyone else but me." Do you want to own up to that, Joe?

"had I been alive during Dr. Kings time I would have supported his cause fully and even understood the actions of his more radical followers. "

Historians laugh at statements like this. 99% of people say "had I been alive then I would never have owned slaves or participated in the Holocaust!" Yet people did. En masse. Are you suggesting that somehow our genetic pool has changed so much in the past few decades that people now really are impervious to negative social influences?

The plain truth is Joe, that you don't know what you would've done during then. Had you lived in Alabama, you easily could've participated in a lynch mob.

The best litmus test we have of how we would engaged in past historical wrongs is to see how we're responding to current wrongs. Even if we set aside the issue of animal rights, surely Joe, you would admit that all is not well in the world. We have genocide in Darfur, rampant poverty across the world (even in our own country), and children not receiving adequate education because of the color of their skin. So step up to the plate Joe. Let us know - how are you putting your neck on the line, sacrificing your own personal comfort, and fighting for what's right?

Sending in a check to a nonprofit doesn't count, by the way. King would've demanded much more of you.

"They were fighting for equal rights entitled to them by law"

Joe probably thinks that they were entitled to rights by law because of the Reconstruction amendments to our Constitution. Boy is Joe wrong.

Although the civil rights movement often used this as a campaign slogan, they actually did not have legal protection until the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the mid/late-sixties. Plessy v. Ferguson said that everything the South was doing with respect to Jim Crow laws was perfectly legal. Nothing in any of the Reconstruction amendments seems to find anything wrong with sharecropping. De facto slavery it was, but freely engaged contract it still is.

Brown v. BOE is largely recognized among legal scholars as an act of judicial activism. Benevolent and good for the country, no doubt, but judicial activism nonetheless less.

So before these favorable court decisions and new laws were passed, the law was not on their side. Were the terrorists then Joe?

Just own up to the fact that we cannot actually separate the question of what tactics are justifiable with the question of what is the cause fighting for. You dislike animal rights activists simply because you think their cause is illegitimate - and you should start saying so overtly.

"Every commercial farm that grows soybeans for your oh so tasty vegan burger excludes animals by fence and uses lethal means of animal control outside (animal damage permits)."

Please elaborate more on this claim. I googled "animal damage permits" and seemed to come up with nothing. Educate me.

(As an aside, most, if not all, harms you can successfully establish with plant agriculture will simply be greatly magnified as we increase animal agriculture production. This is because animal agriculture necessitates a great deal more plant agriculture to produce feed for animals. If we were all vegans, there would be much much less plant agriculture.)

Joe: I was going to respond, but Stephen has done quite nicely. I would like to add, however, that veganism is not a "lifestyle choice." It is about the moral treatment of animals. Since you make your living telling people that they can take animal life because YOU say so, I doubt very much you would understand our philosophy.

Joe: Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democratic sponsor of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, said point blank that it could be used to target non-violent civil disobedience. I have absolutely no doubt that similar attacks would have been waged against the non-violence civil disobedience of MLK, if the "War on Terrorism" had been around back then.

Joe,
I will be blunt. Pull your head out of your ass, take a deep breath and get in touch with reality. You are tiresome and must know that your feeble arguments are never going to convert any of us to your views, as I am sure we accept that we will never convert you to ours.

Will, had I been alive during Dr. Kings time I would have supported his cause fully and even understood the actions of his more radical followers. They were fighting for equal rights entitled to them by law and were being denied such simple things as to ride in the front of bus.

I have no desire to see anybody's rights denied to them and I think that the AETA is worded right so that it allows the activist to still protest but also protect the rights of those being protested. I know that there will always be those that will still do terrorist acts despite the AETA, hopefully not as many because of the stiffer penalties.

I have a right just as anyone else to go to my job (which is to protect the environment) without having to worry about every package that is delivered or if my wife and kids are ok.

Kathy, I assume you are a vegan? What right do you have to force your lifestyle choice onto me? There are 2 things on this planet producers and consumers, plants are producers and everything else is a consumer. I don't care if you are a vegan or meatatarian like it or not for you to eat something has to die.

Every commercial farm that grows soybeans for your oh so tasty vegan burger excludes animals by fence and uses lethal means of animal control outside (animal damage permits). I know this because I am the person who issues these permits in my area. So unless you grow EVERY morsel of food you eat some group of animals was killed for you to have your bocca burgers.

Just so you know PETA has facilitated more animals deaths than me!

Thank you.

Joe:

First, this is not an "AR" site. The focus has always been on civil liberties, and the implications (both contemporary, and historical) of labeling people as "terrorists." This is exactly the type of material I have posted since day one.

You raise an important point, about Dr. King not using bombs or threatening lives. Even though he did neither of those things, he was the target of massive FBI surveillance and intimidation tactics. Moreover, other people in the civil rights movement DID use those tactics, and more-- including taking up arms.

The contemporary correlation is that mainstream activists are being labeled as "terrorists" right alongside the so-called "radical" groups. To be clear, I think neither fit the definition. But I think it's telling that tactics of Dr. King, including civil disobedience, are now labeled "terrorism" under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

Then, just as now, the government does not stop at going after the more radical elements. It's the belief system that is seen as the true threat.

Will

Joe: It has EVERYTHING to do with it. Fighting for animal rights is just as important as fighting for human rights. What makes you think you have a greater right to facilitate the deaths of many animals than others have to save those same animals?? Who put them in YOUR charge instead of in MY charge?? NO ONE. You have no greater right to determine the outcome of their lives than anyone else. Those who care for animals have every right (and duty) to save them from those (like yourself) who traffic in their death and destruction.

What does this have to do with AR? Dr. King fought for HUMAN rights and never used bombs or thretened the lives of other people children like some animal rights terrorist do.

Wow. That really puts his death in a whole new light.

Why? We all knew he knew he was a goner. "I may not get there with you.". Another black civil rights leader actually told his wife she shouldn't have bothered ironing so many shirts. he didn't believe he'd live long enough to wear them. Horrible times.