Sen. Robert Byrd (D-Va.) recently gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate which animal rights activists are already repeating ad nauseum. Here’s a sample:
Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric. Six-hundred pound hogs. . . raised in 2-foot-wide metal cages called gestation crates, in which the poor beasts are unable to turn around or lie down in natural positions. . . veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.
If this were coming from anyone else this would be more bleating from a mindless pro-animal rights politicians (and there are more of them around than you might think). But it’s especially odd coming from Sen. Byrd. Here’s another heartfelt opinion from a letter that Byrd was forced a couple years ago to concede that he had written when he was 28. In the letter, addressed to the late Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, Byrd wrote that he would never fight in a racially integrated military. Byrd wrote,
Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
At the time this letter surfaced, in 1999, Byrd claimed he couldn’t possibly imagine how he had ever been seduced into believing such ideas. That didn’t stop Byrd from being one of numerous southern Democrats to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nor did it stop him from telling Fox News earlier this year, “There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time. I’m going to use that word.”
Whatever else he is, Sen. Byrd doesn’t strike me as particularly compassionate, and more importantly he’s hardly proven himself to be much of a critical thinker — meaning he should fit right in with the usual suspect.