Our Threatened Freedom

Do You Want a Vegetarian World

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 130-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 130

Dictation Name: Vol. J - Part 13 - Do You Want a Vegetarian World

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Do you want a vegetarian world? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

One of the amazing facts about our time is that so many people are determined to control the rest of us and to compel us to live exactly as they do.

We have now an animal rights movement which is determined to protect all meat animals and to assert their rights for them. Before you write this movement off as too far out to be worth talking about, let me tell you that it is holding well attended regional planning conferences. In early summer the animal rights movement was able to get Representative Ronald {?}, Ohio democrat to introduce the bill to study the question of animal rights and husbandry practices. A substantial number of letter requesting action on the bill reached the House Agricultural subcommittee.

Alex Hershaft, the leader in the animal rights movement and a vegetarian, defined the aim of the movement as a training and mobilizing of people to effect social change. He said, quote, “The animal rights movement is a natural extension of other movements, civil rights, anti-war sentiment.” Unquote. He charged that cows, calves, chickens, turkeys, are raised under inhuman conditions on factory farms, and expressed as a goal, an increasing vegetarianism. At one conference, one attendee declared, quote, “A non-violent world has its roots in a non-violent diet.” Unquote. In other worlds, world peace will come through world vegetarianism. If this were true, India with its vegetarianism should have a history of peace, which is hardly the case.

More important, what we have here is an effort to move towards regulations and controls, which would coerce us all into vegetarianism. The procedure is first to create a national opinion that animal raising and slaughtering processes are cruel and disgraceful and therefore to control them. Second, the controls would lead to higher prices on meat and push more and more of us into involuntary vegetarianism. Third, in the name of animal rights, the next step may then be to ban the killing of food animals. Perhaps then we may get a vegetable rights movement, and we would all be on a diet of hot air.

I am for the freedom of these people to express their opinions, and to convert others to vegetarianism. I am not in favor of their coercive tactics.

Moreover, when freedom is used foolishly, then freedom is cheapened and begins to wane. Freedom requires responsibility to survive, not foolishness.

This has been R.J Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.