Puppies are not People

Charged with dumping live puppies in the trash way back in 2019, the courtroom erupted in a unified gasp as defense attorney for 54-year-old Deborah Culwell protested the proposed bond increase for his client. Originally set at ten thousand dollars, the judge was about to raise it to fifty thousand when Culwell's attorney, Joseph Cavanaugh, stuck his proverbial foot, all of it, in his mouth. Arguing against the stiffer bond, Cavanaugh stated the obvious. He reminded the Judge that the puppies were not people and as such, the DA's request for his client's bond increase should be denied.

Needless to say, Cavanaugh hit a hypersensitive nerve because, according to the report, the entire courtroom "gasped" at his pronouncement. Hence, Cavanaugh's dehumanization of the tiny K-9's also spawned the outrage of Katie Phillips, vice president of Society's Outkasts Animal Rescue. "I couldn't believe that, ‘Puppies are not people,’” Phillips said. “I loved it when the entire audience gasped when he had the gall to say that about these precious creatures of the Earth."

Did you catch that? Cavanaugh “had the gall to say that puppies are not people”! He had the audacity to understand a bit more about simple reality than most to state the obvious. He had the nerve to assume that human beings are really a special "breed" and that an unbridgeable gap separates them from animals, even the cutest puppies.    

And his reward for stating the obvious - the facts – ye, even the truth?

Disbelief! Outrage! Gasps!

But why?

For starters, Cavanaugh crossed the line of contemporary thinking. He referred to both people and pups, realized or not, according to an "outdated," biblical, and now officially rejected paradigm.  He spoke regarding the state of things as they are, i.e., the truth, and as Scripture states them. And as a result, he found himself on the receiving end of a unified gasp intended as a social lashing.

While I could elaborate on the audience’s faulty assumptions, I prefer counting this courtroom “gasp” at the truth as a sample of worse things to come. In other words, Christians must prepare for the “gasps” of a generation increasingly appalled by truth and its absoluteness. We must get used to what will prove to be the new normal for true believers and anticipate an increase in cultural “gasps” expressed in various forms. We should expect a rise, then, in verbal, social, economic, and eventually, legal backlashes for merely stating that which is simply true.

We must now expect an increasing number of horrified “gasps” from a generation that interprets mere moral disagreement as “hate speech.” Rather than those “sudden loud intakes of breath caused by surprise or shock” expressed in the courtroom, we must expect “gasps” expressed in social shaming, media outrage, or even company firings over the simplest of truths. Be it the condemnation of homosexuality as unnatural, calling the gender dysphoric by their actual rather than their preferred pronouns, or standing firm on Jesus’ affirmation of marriage as a male/female thing. We must brace ourselves for the creative “gasps” to follow.  

I am convinced that this trend will intensify, but in a culture where it is both culturally abhorrent and illegal to dump live puppies in the trash yet perfectly lawful to discard aborted children across the nation, what do you expect? We’re seeing the words of Christ in high definition now. “And this is the condemnation,” said Jesus, “that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

Tony