Anti-hunting activist Stuart Chaifetz recently posted an open letter to presumptive Democrat Party presidential nominee John Kerry. After a rambling few paragraphs about Ralph Nader and Florida, Chaifetz gets to the heart of the matter — Kerry is cruel for hunting,
On the subject of the slaughter of the innocent, tell me, why it is that Democrats feel they must prove their “manliness” by carting guns and shooting small animals?
Back in December, Vice-President Cheney went on a hunting trip in Pennsylvania and shot 70 farm-raised birds. This caused a great controversy, and certainly was an opportunity for you to show how different you were. Instead, what we saw was your own dark desire to kill. The Washington Post recorded how you love to hunt, kill and gut animals such as deer, duck and quail. The focus of the article, however, was on doves.
You probably thought this was a cute way to show how “tough” you were. Here is the very symbol of peace, the dove, and John Kerry not only likes to blow them apart, but eat them as well.
I am tempted to drift into deep sarcasm about this, but I’d rather leave you with the image of one single airborne dove, her dark eyes set against pillowy white feathers, turned, in a blast of gun shot, into a falling package of crimson gore. And there, waiting for her, is John Kerry, smiling.
One would think that, since you were shot in Vietnam, you would never want to inflict such pain into any other living being. Sadly, we see that you do it not only for pleasure, but for some political gain as well. Bush and Cheney are the preferred of the gun-lover and animal-killer. Once again you chase unwilling votes while losing so many more.
Somehow I doubt that Kerry is all that concerned about losing the ridiculously small number of people who might have voted for him if he was not a hunter, especially compared to the significant number of rural voters whose votes he will need far more of in order to have a chance at defeating Bush in November.
Source:
An Open Letter to John Kerry. Stuart Chaifetz, May 3, 2004.