Month: March 2001

'Nuremberg Files' Web Site Verdict Thrown Out – Victory for Animal Rights Activists

The Associated Press reports that a three-judge panel in the 9th District Court has thrown out the controversial civil lawsuit against the Nuremberg Files web site.

The Nuremberg Files was a web site set up by anti-abortion activists. Among other things, the site listed names and other personal information about doctors who performed abortions. It also included posters that mimicked wanted posters but included pictures of abortion providers which it referred to as “baby butchers.”

Three doctors whose names appeared on lists maintained by the Nuremberg Files were murdered. Planned Parenthood sued the Nuremberg Files in court under provisions of the |Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization| statute claiming that the web site was essentially the focal point of a criminal conspiracy. That nobody involved with the web site had committed or even planned any acts of violence was irrelevant — the contents of the web site itself made the Nuremberg Files responsible, in part, for abortion-related violence.

A jury agreed with Planned Parenthood and the proprietors of the site were ordered to pay damages to Planned Parenthood and several abortion doctors.

The 9th District Court unanimously agreed that the jury was wrong — what the Nuremberg Files did was speech protected by the First Amendment. In the majority opinion, Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote,

If defendants threatened to commit violent acts, by working alone or with others, then their [works] could properly support the verdict. But if their [works] merely encouraged unrelated terrorists, then their words are protected by the First Amendment.

This will have a major impact on a number of pending suits against animal rights activists.

First, this is going to end up in the Supreme Court. Planned Parenthood has the deep pockets necessary to see this case through to the end. They will especially be encouraged to do so since the 9th Circuit Court’s decisions are often overturned by the Supreme Court. It has a reputation for rendering decisions that the Supreme Court later deems to be an excessively broad interpretation of the Constitution.

Second, if the verdict survives a Supreme Court challenge, the various RICO suits against animal rights activists are dead. If the 9th Circuit Court is correct, then an Animal Liberation Front site can list personal information about, say, federally-funded medical researchers, and cheer those who commit violent acts, but so long as they don’t directly threaten or engage in a conspiracy with those who commit violence, there is no legal recourse.

I suspect the Supreme Court will overturn the 9th District’s opinion, even if it ultimately sides with the Nuremberg Files, since the decision provides a gaping legal hole for people conspiring to commit murder.

Source:

Court: OK to Encourage Abortion Threat. David Kreats, Associated Press, March 28, 2001.

Animal Rights Activist Attack Peter Singer Over Bestiality Stance

Peter Singer still has not made any comments about his book review for Nerve which, on the most friendly interpretation, offered a weak argument against bestiality. While People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Ingrid Newkirk offered a defense of Singer, many animal rights activists were quick to pile on denunciations of Singer, many of which were posted to the Nerve web site as well as being distributed through Internet e-mail lists.

Friends of Animals president Priscillia Feral wrote,

Friends of Animals, an interntional non-profit organization with 200,000 members throughout the world dedicated to promoting the rights of animals and concern for wildlife and the environment, denounces Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer, for an essay in which Singer maintains that under some circumstances, it is acceptable for humans and animals to have sex with each other. FoA finds Singer’s position shocking and disgusting. Bestiality is wrong in part because the animal cannot meaningfully consent to sex with a human. In this sense, bestiality is wrong for the same reason pedophilia is wrong. Children cannot consent to sexual contact and neither can animals. Contrary to a statement from a spokesperson for PETA, Singer’s essay isn’t an intellectual issue, and his thinking isn’t logical. It’s a moral issue. Singer and his apologists just need to stop repeating every annoying idea they’ve developed for shock value.

Megan Metzellar, program coordinator for Friends of Animals weighed in as well,

Singer is basically condoning rape and molestation as long as one (presumably he?) can find a way to interpret the situation as being “mutually satisfying.” I suppose Mr. Singer can find a way to justify any base behavior in his mind via his meaningless hypotheticals. Singer has been put on a pedestal by the animal rights movement for a very long time but this essay is a wake-up call to those who have blindly idolized him. Moreover, since women are often sexually abused and exploited in conjunction with acts of bestiality, feminists should be outraged by his position on this issue. Child advocates should also be alarmed since Singer is condoning sex acts in which one party is basically incapable of giving consent. Singer is in dangerous territory here and if he has any sense left he will realize the potential fallout from this essay and retract his position.

Theodora Capaldo, president of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, was worried about the damage that Singer’s views will have on the animal rights movement.

As someone who has played and continues to play a high profile and influential role in the animal rights movement, I believe your responsibility changes. The success of animal liberation depends not only on the ideology, the legal arguments, and the philosophical reasoning but perhaps more importantly on the sophisticated strategies that will allow mainstream populations to hear the message, accept the message and act on the message. Heavy Petting will come back to haunt us and is a step backwards. Unchallenged, this essay will serve to further marginalize and, therefore, damage the animal rights movement. The consequences of it will push us back into the bubble-gum bottomed recess of prejudice that hell hole of ridicule that remains our greatest obstacle and enemy. Some people may care about your thoughts on bestiality from some perverse unconscious desires. More significantly, however, many others will study your every word not to better ground their arguments in support of animal rights but rather to find new ways to discredit our efforts. They have been given new ammunition and new accusations with which to boost their arguments about the absurdity of our beliefs. Heavy Petting will be used against us. Have no doubt.

Live by the sound bite, die by the sound bite.

Gary Francione, who seems to have laid low after shutting down his animal law center, reminded animal rights activists that Singer’s argument is beside the point since the existence of pets is an abomination itself, regardless of whether or not anyone is having sex with the animals.

Even if animals can desire to have sexual contact with humans, that does not mean that they are “consenting” to that contact any more than does a child who can have sexual desires (or who even initiates sexual contact) can be said to consent to sex. Moreover, Peter ignores completely that bestiality is a phenomenon that occurs largely within the unnatural relationship of domestication; a domestic animal can no more consent to sex than could a human slave. Therefore, since the threshold requirement–informed consent–cannot be met, sexual contact with animals cannot be morally justified….It is bad enough that Peter defends the killing or other exploitation of those humans whose lives he regards as not worth living, and, through his pop media image, he has succeeded in connecting the issue of animal rights with the very ideas that were promoted by some academics as part of the theoretical basis for Nazism. It is bad enough that the “father of the animal rights movement” regards PETA’s sell-out liaison with McDonalds as “the biggest step forward for farm animals in America in the past quarter of a century” (a direct quote from Peter) and that PETAphiles are pointing to Peter’s approval as justification for the sell-out. It is bad enough that Peter continues to support and promote those whose unethical actions have actually harmed animals. Bestiality merits nothing more or less than our outright and unequivocal condemnation. Peter’s disturbing view that humans and nonhumans may enjoy sexual contact as part of “mutually satisfying activities” will only further harm the cause of animal rights, and I can only hope that those who care will register their strong dissent.

Aside from the animal rights movement, it will be interesting to see how the Princeton community reacts to Singer’s newly found views on sex with animals.

Intolerance Run Rampant

This is really unbelievable. Apparently the Pennsylvania State University’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had its constitution and mission statement censured by the PSU student government. According to the student government, the YAF constitution and mission statement were discriminatory.

How were they discriminatory? Both referred to upholding “God-given free will, whence derives the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” According to the student government, that wording reflected a “devotion to god” which was discriminatory. As a result, YAF was told to either change the wording or it would not longer be allowed as a student group.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education worked with the YAF and a university committee overruled the student government (for more information see FIRE’s press release about the incident).

Unfortunately, there seems to be a growing ambivalence to and even ignorance of the fundamental role that protection of free speech plays in civil society. The Christian Science Monitor reported some depressing news today on that front. It reports that in a recent study, 75 percent of teachers knew the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, but less than 25 percent of teachers could name the other rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

And, of course, administrators outright rejected the notion that high school students could be trusted with free speech. Less than a third said that students at public high schools should be allowed to report on controversial issues for their student newspapers without explicit permission from the administration.

That IBM-Holocaust Book

ArsTechnica recently linked to one of the better (though short) reviews of Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. Reviewing the book for The New York Times‘s, Gabriel Schoenfeld wwrites of the book,

The key question, in any case, is not whether I.B.M. sold Germany its equipment but whether, as alleged, it made the Final Solution part of its ”mission” and whether its relationship with Germany in any way ”energized” or significantly ”enhanced” Hitler’s efforts to destroy world Jewry. On the first point, Black never even attempts to substantiate his accusation — a scandalous omission considering the gravity of the charge. As for the second, his shaky evidence leads him to oscillate between two completely irreconcilable positions.

On the one hand, Black argues that I.B.M., through its German subsidiary, ”designed, executed and supplied the indispensable technological assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before — the automation of human destruction.” On the other hand, he maladroitly hedges, noting that even if Germany had completely lacked I.B.M.’s efficiency-enhancing tools, ”the Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did proceed — with simple bullets, death marches and massacres based on pen and paper persecution.” But if that is so, in what sense were the punch cards and the tabulating machines ”indispensable”?

Planting Shrubs in Kalamazoo

Later today the President is going to give a speech about 100 yards from my office here in Kalamazoo, the main effect of which is I won’t get to work out because they’ve decided to have him speak from the Recreation Center here.

The security here is amazing — they shut down most of the Recreation Center four days ago, and the Secret Service has been everywhere.

I wonder if Bush will give the same paramount consideration to safety of civilians the next time he decides to bomb Iraq?

Anyway, on a related topic, although I try not to be an elitist sometimes I have the feeling that I am the last conscious person left in Michigan. The hot topic with my liberal friends lately has been Bush’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards on arsenic.

For those not following that debate, an independent report a few years ago concluded that the current standard, 50 parts per billion, is probably too high, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what would be an acceptable standard because there isn’t a lot of conclusive research on such low levels, except in animal models.

So the EPA went ahead and put forth a 5 parts per billion standard which Bush killed. My liberal friends have been going on about how this is just for the evil corporations who want to dump arsenic in our water. Amazingly, not a single person who has brought this up to me as an example of a good regulation killed by corporate greed was aware that the major problem with the standard was that arsenic occurs naturally in large quantities in many Western states and the cost of complying with the new standard would have been extremely expensive — far in excess of even the most optimistic estimates of benefits.

If you look at a state like New Mexico, for example, it is not inconceivable that it could cost literally billions of dollars to bring their water treatment systems in compliance with a 5 parts per billion standard. Promulgating such expensive regulations without a clearer idea of the benefits is the worst sort of government intervention.