Princeton professor: Sex with animals OK
The Layman Online, July 3, 2002
Professor Peter Singer, a self-professed atheist at Presbyterian-founded Princeton University, gave a speech in McLean, Va., recently in which he declared that:
- Sex with animals is all right if it is consensual. “Your dog or whatever else it is can show you when he or she wants to engage in a certain kind of contact.”
- Christianity is a “problem.”
- Human beings are not superior to animals – and, therefore, have no right to kill them. “I hope that you don’t think that just being a biological member of the species homo sapiens means that you do have a soul and being a member of some other species means they don’t.”
- Why, if all have souls, is it OK for animals to kill each other but not for humans to kill them? “Animals generally are not making moral choices. Animals are not the same as humans. They don’t reflect on what they are doing and think about the alternatives. Humans can.”
- He might break the rule on not killing animals if termites are eating up his house, but he would first consider trying to drive away the pests in a non-brutal manner.
- Asked by a woman if it was all right to kill a hunter trying to kill geese, he said he doesn’t support violence but he does encourage civil disobedience.
- He modified his previously published view that parents should be able to kill a child up to 28 days after birth. On second thought, he said, “you can’t really propose any cutoff date,” but the decision should be made “as soon as possible after birth.”
- Besides, he says, a chimpanzee has more self-awareness at birth than an infant.
Singer is the author of Animal Liberation and professor of bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.
Singer’s audience was the national Animal Rights 2002 conference whose attendees wore buttons and t-shirts declaring “Milk is Murder;” “Stop Hunting;” “Animal Liberation: Wire Cutters are a terrible thing to Waste;” “Beef, it’s what is rotting in your colon,” and, with a cow featured in the slogan, “I died for your sins.”