On an earlier post, I posted a link and an excerpt from a Time article about Matthew Scully writing Sarah Palin’s RNC speech. I found a couple of others who noticed the same paragraph in that article.
“Matthew Scully: Back in the Box!”
“Palin and Scully”
“Sarah Palin Has Her Way with Matthew Scully”
Huh. While Googling, I found this:
“From ‘Dominion’ to Domination: The Duplicity and Complicity of Matthew Scully”
Wow. This is a pretty scathing article. I wouldn’t say that AR people are so single-issue that they ignore a person’s opposing ideologies. I personally thought, here’s a guy who can speak to a whole new group about topics of animal suffering — the other half of the country — and one that needs to hear, because they don’t seem to be listening to the AR Movement. Interesting, anyway.
He mentions two people I know in the article. I might as well include an excerpt, although it isn’t the only, or main, thing that the article is about. Please read the whole thing.
“I think the fact that Matthew Scully wrote her convention speech (which was a masterpiece of viciousness) should give us all pause about the notion that conservatives will ever be serious animal advocates. I used to think that AR [animal rights] was a non-political issue and that we should keep it that way in the interests of converting as many people as possible and having the greatest impact on society. I no longer think that. I now believe that the mindset that leads conservatives to pursue policies that are hostile to the well-being of most of humanity (everyone except themselves and those to whom they are close) almost invariably leads them to policies that are hostile to the well-being of most animals (everyone except those to whom they are personally close, such as their companion animals).
“There is nothing that I find more perplexing and discouraging than the blatant speciesism that is rampant in most progressive circles. But in spite of this, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the liberal to progressive end of the political spectrum is where we have to concentrate our efforts and where we will ultimately find our victory. Conservatives can, in many cases, be persuaded to welfarism (properly so called, not as redefined by the so-called “abolitionists”), but not to AR. Scully’s vehement denunciations of AR in Dominion are, I think, an important indicator of this, as is the fact that this man who wrote so eloquently of the suffering of animals could put his gifts in the service of a woman who practices and celebrates all manner of barbaric cruelty to animals. Scully obviously considers the lives and suffering of animals less important than politics as usual.”
Phelps is right to argue that the Left is just as abysmal in its views on animals, and yet draws this distinction:
“The speciesism of liberals/progressives contradicts their fundamental values, which creates an opportunity for animal advocates. The speciesism of conservatives reinforces their fundamental values, which creates a solid wall. But I still think it is dangerous for the AR movement, as a movement, to align with other social justice movements until we have succeeded in raising their consciousness about animals to the point that the alliance can be formed on a basis of at least approximate equality. And I think a lot of groundwork needs to be done before we reach that point. I guess where I’m headed is that we need to be taking that groundwork seriously and getting busy at it—which, of course, is what you’ve been doing for some time now.”
This site includes a response from Karen Dawn at the end.
“Palin’s speechwriter not a fan of hunting” I’m posting the whole thing, which was printed in the Austin American-Statesman (and elsewhere) because there are some good quotes from Dominion.
Palin’s speechwriter not a fan of hunting
By Ken Herman | Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 10:32 AM
Former longtime Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully is the man behind tonight’s convention speech by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which is interesting in light of Scully’s moral opposition to hunting and Palin’s love of the activity.
The speech by the woman selected by John McCain as his running mate is viewed as crucial as she withstands withering scrutiny of everything about her. Among the things learned about Palin is her love of hunting.
“We hunt as much as we can, and I’m proud to say our freezer is full of wild game we harvested here in Alaska,” she recently told Newsweek.
Another report detailed the home where her parents “live amid hundreds of sets of trophy antlers and a taxidermy collection that includes a giant moose head and a full-grown mountain lion.”
The photo above, published in London’s Daily Mail, shows the grizzly bear skin on a sofa in her Anchorage office. Chuck Heath, the governor’s dad, bagged the bear, Sally Heath, the governor’s mom, told the British paper. And the Heaths said they heard the news about McCain picking their daughter as they returned from a reindeer hunt washed out by rain.
“Sarah grew up hunting. She can use a gun. She and her daddy would wake up at 3 a.m. on school days to hunt moose,” the governor’s mom told the paper.
Now, at some length, here are some excerpts from a 2002 book by Scully, a George W. Bush speechwriter in the White House for five years. The book is “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.” It is a condemnation of factory farming, trophy hunting and other activities involving animals.
On page 347, Scully challenges Roger Scruton, a hunting advocate:
“Like other sport hunters, too, Mr. Scruton carries his moral relativism a step further in his constant appeals to experience. To ‘understand’ hunting and the delights of the ‘substantial minority’ of people who enjoy it (five to seven percent) we must hunt, submerge ourselves in the raw, choiceless passion of it all. We, too, might then know that sense of ‘homecoming to our natural state.’”
“Of course, this is an argument equally available to enthusiasts of bull-fighting, cockfighting, bear-baiting, hare coursing, crush videos, or, for that, matter pornography in general. Since when do we have to indulge in vice before we may adjudge it as such?”
Earlier in the book, on page nine, this from Scully:
“Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheeer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is out fellow creatures’ lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man.”
“And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth’s happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man’s attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational or wicked.”
So far today, no response from Scully about how he reconciles his work for Palin and his feelings about hunting.
A political operative familiar with Scully offered this: “Yeah, there is a kind of delicious irony re Scully working for the moose hunter, eh?”
Disclosurer about some of my complaints, including things that I consider deceptive…. The things she said in her speech that bothered me are actually Matthew Scully’s words, not hers. (Nevertheless, if it worked in the speech, it’s worth repeating.) In that light, I have to post a picture of a T-Shirt that a friend sent to me:
That, and more, are available here.
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