In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror. —Goodwell Nzou

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Kate Steinle is murdered in San Francisco as a result of an immoral, unlawful immigration policy, and undercover videos reveal that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, is likely trafficking in the remains of aborted babies, and unlawfully changing its abortion procedures to obtain the best possible “specimens” for resale on the tissue/organ market. The same people outraged over Cecil are silent about the death of Kate and the unborn.

Anger reveals a lot about a person’s values and their priorities. In the case of Cecil, Kate and Planned Parenthood, it is evident many liberals/progressives in this country, especially in the major media, regard the death of a lion as more outrage-worthy than the death of an American woman and countless unborn Americans. —Brian Fahy & Garrett Fahy

I tried to imagine if there could be any valid reason for a wild cat to become the biggest news item in the world. On a day when another undercover video revealed Planned Parenthood dismembering murdered children for profit, I strained to think if there might be some justification for ignoring the harvesting of human beings in favor of obsessing over a large feline in Africa. 

I thought maybe the lion had cured cancer, or sprouted wings and flown into space, or stood on its hind legs and recited the Gettysburg Address. Surely, these developments would vindicate the disproportionate amount of attention it was receiving. But I quickly found out that the lion, from Zimbabwe, had done no such thing. Apparently, all it did was die.

Of course, lots of people died yesterday too, especially in Zimbabwe. Across the planet, human travesties continued to unfold – Christians were slaughtered in the Middle East, political prisoners were tortured and executed in North Korea and Iran, Americans fell prey to crime and violence spilling over our southern border, and about 3,000 human children were butchered in abortion clinics, some of which were then dissected and sold on the black market – but this one unfortunate beast in a forest 9,000 miles away trumped all of these. Human victims would have to wait yet another day to be noticed by our culture. Their plight just couldn’t compete with a cute, fuzzy mammal.— Matt Walsh

But the issue isn’t whether abortion is legal. Abortion has been legal for decades. That’s not going to change.

This is something else again: Reducing human life to a commodity, subject to market whims, where the “procedure” (meaning abortion) is altered so that the fetal organs may be kept intact, to be bartered and sold.

You can say that it’s not human life. And many do. But in this case, using euphemisms is a shield. I suppose we can convince ourselves that the research “materiel” is not human, until of course, you see a lab tech with tweezers pick up a tiny limb.

And though many avoid the implications of this, it just might be that there is a cost, to all of us, even as we shut our eyes.

Everything has a cost. Avoidance most of all. – John Kass

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Were it not for having to be in the car this week driving Blondie to a class in the arts district, I might have completely missed the outrage over Cecil, a lion, dying. It is a terrible story, which I hope ends with us all finding out that the doctor responsible for the animal’s death was indeed misled by unscrupulous guides, and that he had no knowledge that what he was doing by killing Ol’ Cecil was wrong, at least in the legal sense. However, I think it is a pathetic and distressing thing that more people are incensed and frothing at the mouth over a dead LION, than are about the dismembering of dead human babies by Planned Parenthood. Seriously, 24/7 news about a lion, but the abortion clinic stuff is on page twelve of the classifieds?

Really now, “come, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), You who pretend to care for humanity; you who probably call yourself “humanists;” you who likely claim to have a special interest in human rights: You! How can You sit by and ignore the death of millions of babies, some of whom are having their remains carved up and sold off like cattle in a stockyard? Disturbingly, it seems You care more about a wild beast with fangs and claws than a defenseless human baby; surely, your moral compass broke years ago. Don’t human lives, particularly innocent infants’ lives “matter” more than a single lion’s life? Strike that. ANY animal’s life? How screwed up are we as a society, as humanity, when Cecil’s death creates more fervor than babies bodies being desecrated, being treated as garbage, labeled as medical “waste” because a woman’s so-called right is to engage in infanticide? Is it also Planned Parenthood’s right to profit from it? I’ve little doubt You decry the Military-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma, but what about the Abortion Industry? Make no mistake, You, there is indeed such a thing. Oy! It makes my head spin and my soul ache to realize how far off the mark we have veered.

Concerning abortion, please, know, I do not consider myself to be any sort of Pro-Life “activist,” though I find restricting abortions as much as possible (while still keeping them accessible) to be an important fight to have. Abortion is not health care, nor has it anything to do with women’s sexual freedoms. What about freedom should give women the right to decide well beyond the point of “fetal” viability, or it’s ability to feel pain, for that matter, whether another human being lives or dies?

I am blessed with two teen-aged daughters, sixteen and almost thirteen, and have always held that if anything happened to them, particularly rape or incest, where one of them found themselves with child at a tender age, abortion would not be off the table. I believe it is cruel to expect a young girl to carry on with a pregnancy when she is not emotionally or physically prepared for such an event; pregnancy can be difficult enough on those of us beyond our middle and high school years. 

Nevertheless, I can understand that there are reasons for some to seek an abortion, but if it is to occur, is twenty weeks not PLENTY of time to make that decision (though twelve is even better)? After that, folks, it should be for the long haul. How can that even be in dispute? There are LOTS of families out there who would love to adopt, and lots of reasons to choose adoption, particularly if one is on the back side of puberty. “Late term” abortions, otherwise known as partial- birth abortions, are nothing short of butchery. To believe otherwise is to be willfully blind, delusional, and devoid of reason regarding the reality of what is being done to these poor babies. It is cruelty in it’s most vile form (though I’m sure you feel similarly about the death penalty). When that innocent child could thrive outside of its mother’s body, but we leave the choice of infanticide, of killing a healthy, viable infant, in the hands of someone who is quite likely mentally unstable, we, as a society, are sick. Irredeemable, even. 

But still, let’s keep worrying about a lion, why don’t we? After all, “Lion Lives Matter.” At least, to some misguided souls, they matter a great deal more than innocent human ones; and theirs are the voices that scream the loudest these days.

Below is the text from an article from writer Heather Wilhelm, which I think sums this ridiculousness up quite well:

One of the joys of the digital age, at least to many, is the thrill of discovering a new World’s Most Despicable Person. You know the drill: First, some poor sap says or does something dumb or politically incorrect. Next, mobs of wild-eyed, unhinged keyboard cops swoop in to judge, shame, excoriate, and issue over-the-top condemnations. Finally, if they’re lucky, the Mean Typing League might even manage to destroy a life or a reputation or a business or two, not to mention everyone’s general faith in humanity.

After performing this ritual cleansing, one assumes, those involved feel slightly better about themselves. This sense of inner peace and superiority has not yet been scientifically measured, but it lasts, alas, for only a few fleeting days. That’s when it’s time to find a new World’s Most Despicable Person.

Heather Wilhelm

This week, that person is Dr. Walter James Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota with the unfortunate habit of paying copious amounts of money to kill large, exotic animals around the globe. Earlier in July, as the world discovered this week, Palmer messed with the wrong large, exotic animal: Cecil the Lion, one of Africa’s most beloved and famous lions, a favorite of wildlife researchers, and the “star attraction” of Zimbabwe’s Hwagne National Park.

I, like most of humanity, had never heard of Cecil the Lion until this week—thanks to the Internet, he now has approximately five million devoted new best friends, who had also, oddly, never heard of him until now—but there are several videos of him circulating online. He seems like a nice enough lion, I guess, if you like sexist oppressor male kings of the jungle.

I kid, I kid! Sort of. Alas, the truth about Cecil’s links to the patriarchy is all on YouTube for the world to see: the roaring and biting at those born without male privilege; the casual, utter disregard for female lion self-esteem; the skulking around like a half-hungry Marlon Brando trapped in a Mafia pizza parlor. This is because he was a wild animal, of course, and not a cartoon character. Regardless, let’s move on.

Real lions doing real lion-like things

Cecil lived on nationally protected land in Zimbabwe, but Dr. Palmer’s apparently shady and unscrupulous guides—for whom he paid a whopping $54,000—lured the unsuspecting lion off his nature preserve. There, Palmer shot him with a crossbow. That didn’t do the trick, so a fatal rifle shot came next, but only after tracking the wounded, suffering lion for nearly 40 hours. This was followed by the beheading and skinning of poor Cecil, who certainly didn’t deserve such a cruel fate, but who also, just as a friendly, safety-related reminder, would probably happily eat you in a casual and relaxed fashion if he had the chance.

This week, Cecil’s story exploded, inciting batten-down-the-hatches outrage. Animal rights group PETA, for instance, declared that Dr. Palmer should be “extradited, charged, and preferably hanged” for killing such a beloved creature. In a heated op-ed, former CNN host Piers Morgan proposed a new sport, “Big Human Hunting,” in which he would kill Dr. Palmer with a crossbow, torture him, and skin him alive, which sounds normal if you just had a brain transplant from, say, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Actress Debra Messing argued for revoking Dr. Palmer’s citizenship; Sharon Osborne, who is married to a man who once bit the head off a bat, called for the eradication of Palmer’s home, business, and money. On Tuesday night, an emotional Jimmy Kimmel questioned Dr. Palmer’s erectile abilities before a chortling television audience, called him “vomitous” and “the most hated man in America who never advertised Jell-O pudding on television,” and then helpfully noted that we probably shouldn’t “start a witch hunt for the guy.” Oh. Okay. We’ll just ignore those first parts, broadcast to millions!

A baby, not a blob of tissue. You had a choice, shouldn’t he?

Dr. Palmer, meanwhile, is in hiding. His business is closed, piled with threats and hate mail. Cecil’s killing, the embattled dentist declared in a statement, was a terrible mistake: “I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides to ensure a legal hunt.” This may or may not be true; Dr. Palmer may or may not be an unsavory and unethical character. It’s a sad situation; we’ll have to wait and see. One thing, however, seems indisputable: The world is, as is its eternal wont—and here I shall quote an eminent showbiz bat-biter—going off the rails on a crazy train.

Paying $54,000 to kill a wild, beautiful animal seems like a strange and questionable hobby at best; at worst, it seems downright cruel. On the other hand, some conservationists applaud the practice, at least when it’s done legally. What’s telling, however, is that the great Cecil conflagration of 2015 occurred on the same day undercover operatives released the third in a series of graphic, disturbing Planned Parenthood videos. This video, unlike the former two, featured body parts. Tiny body parts. Detailed, well formed, and unmistakably human.

But never mind. Let’s talk about Cecil, a lion that has emerged as a benevolent, finely

This is NOT the lion you’re crying over

sketched cartoon creature in the global moral imagination, setting our hyperactive but wildly misfiring outrage meter into a wild, chaotic spin. He’s a lot more fun to think about than unborn baby humans, apparently. The villains in his case are certainly more dramatically drawn. And really: Who doesn’t like cartoons better than reality?

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin,Texas. Her work can be found at http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/ and her Twitter handle is @heatherwilhelm.

Extra credit reading:
~ Matt Walsh always has some good thoughts on the issue of abortion, too.
~ Feminists for Life (I found this group several years back while researching a paper about “feminism”- who knew such a group ever existed?!
~ A Lion’s Share of Misplaced Outrage, by Brian Fahy & Garrett Fahy
~ It’s a Lion, Dennis Prager
~ What’s the Cost of Avoiding the Planned Parenthood Videos? by John Kass

~ In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions by Goodwell Nzou