News And Views For The Progressive Society

I have spoke often of the dangers facing hunting, fishing and trapping from our progressive society – one that rationalizes everything from the perspective that values change therefore so should the rules that govern us. Where I come from that’s called the dumbing down of society. The Bible says that God is the “alpha and omega” the beginning and end, that in the beginning there was God and that he is and always has been. I don’t think God changes his values as circumstances arise.

I stepped into a dark canyon this morning when I tripped and stumbled over a website called “CommonDreams.org”, subtitled, “Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Community”. In particular, I found an article by Paul M. Howey called, “If We Won’t Ban Hunting, at Least Let Animals Have the Sabbath as a Day of Rest”.

This typifies the progressive approach toward life in these United States but in particular hunting. Here’s a few samplings from the article.

Let me make certain I’ve heard you correctly, Mark. You say you’re standing beneath the snow-kissed pine branches soaking in all the beauty of God’s creation, and you get the sudden urge to pull the trigger of your steel extension of masculinity and kill one of his magnificent creatures?

Then we find an example of how the progressives create their own spin to fit their rationalizations while accusing other of doing the same. A “do as I say not as I do” approach.

Members of the Fellowship of Christian Hunters and others, I found, rely on the Bible for moral justification of their “sport.” Granted, it is written in Genesis that, after deciding to make mankind, God said they should have “dominion” over all the animals he’d created. Are hunters possibly twisting Bible verses to justify their blood sport?

The answer lies in the word “dominion,” which means “supreme authority.’’ Some interpret it to mean man has the universal, God-given right to kill animals. But supreme authority should also carry with it the responsibility for compassion and stewardship for all living things. To do less, in my opinion, would be, well — unGodly. And then there is that “thou shalt not kill” thing, too.

I never met a progressive who “twisted Bible verses to justify” their sometimes immoral and decedent lifestyles.

And finally, here’s a mouthful. The writer finds more ways to get in punches than a healthy and youthful Mohammad Ali.

I understand the vast majority of hunters do not shoot (okay, there was that unfortunate incident of Vice President Cheney shooting his pal Harry Whittington in the face) their fellow human beings. Still, with so much violence in our society and in the world at large, would it not be prudent to embrace more compassion, not less, for the animals with whom we share the planet?

He lets his Bush/Cheney hatred come shining through, then falls into the “let’s scare the readers” tactic claiming “so much violence in our society”, followed by a few stanzas of “Kumbaya” to better visualize his Utopian ideals.

What bugs me the most about this work of fiction is that much of what he is saying is right and most hunters would mostly agree. He just has a warped perspective of hunters. Howey wants his readers to think that hunters hunt with “their extensions of masculinity” because they want to defy God and kill one of his “magnificent creatures. He questions hunting as a sport, he even refers to it as “blood sport” and tries to convince his readers that hunters aren’t conservationists and we don’t see any beauty when we go to the woods to hunt.

Howey also portrays a hunter as some evil monster because hunters don’t “play on a level playing field” – like what is it he wants? Are we to run the game down and bite the jugular to bleed out our kill?

The writer says hunting is “counterintuitive” and that “nature seeks its own balance and gets out of whack when man interferes”.

Mr. Howey’s perceptions of hunters is so far out of whack, I’m not sure what planet he is living on, or in his own words, “in what alternate universe have you parked your brain?”

Hunters aren’t as Howey describes them as no more than if I said all progressives were “nut jobs”. Hunters fully understand God’s gift and are conservationists. If we weren’t, people like Mr. Howey wouldn’t have much of what he enjoys to experience. If we were to let nature take its course, we should then sit back and let countless people die from disease and animal/human encounters. Sorry, Mr. Howey, that “let nature take its course” went out the window back when you built your “log cabin in the woods of Leicester, North Carolina, with his wife Trish, four dogs, and five parrots”.

Hunting isn’t for everyone and obviously not for Mr. Howey but please sir, if you’re going to spend your time putting down hunting at least tell the truth about hunters.

Tom Remington