Posted by
Compassionate Conservative on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 9:53:53 AM
Although I'm a big sports fan, I never comment on sports issues in this blog. Because it's a political blog, it's simply not the right place - until now. Michael Vick's tentative return to the National Football League has necessitated the exception.
Because this is a political blog, some of you might not be familiar with Mr. Vick, so for your benefit, here's a little background. Michael Vick was the first-string, or starting, quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons. He was at the peak of a good career - leading a winning team to the playoffs a couple of times and selected to the Pro Bowl a couple of times - when, about two and a half years ago, he was identified as the leader and financier of a dog fighting ring operating in his home state of Virginia. He was convicted on charges of fighting dogs, a felony, and wound up spending almost two years in prison. This month, he was finally completed the final phase of his incarceration, house arrest, and was freed to go about his life, having paid his debt to society.
The question now is will Michael be allowed to resume his NFL career. He's still under 30 and is reasonably healthy, especially for a veteran pro football player. I'd like to offer a resounding "YES!" here, for a couple of reasons. First, Michael has, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, paid his debt to society. Rehabilitation is the cornerstone of our penal system, and while many ex-convicts fail and return to crime, Michael seems repentant and certainly seems employable to me.
Second, though, and more important to this blog, while I think fighting dogs is a despicable crime, amounting to nothing less than torturing animals, it really isn't the worst crime in the world. People have committed much worse crimes than this and been successfully rehabilitated. Michael's crimes were committed against dogs, folks, not people, and animal cruelty, while detestable, doesn't even exist in the same universe as crimes against people. In fact, since Roe v. Wade was decided 36 years ago in favor of unrestricted abortion, almost 50 million unborn babies have been killed. Where's the outcry among "animal lovers" against this despicable act?
The fact is that there are some people who consider animals, even insects, as the equivalent of human beings. Indeed, there are some who consider animals morally superior! For this group, killing unborn children is nothing, but where is the moral outrage among the population of sane people, with the exception of some dedicated pro-lifers, for the murder of our most innocent citizens? I'm sorry, but Michael Vick's crime, and it was a crime, pales in comparison to the crimes against the unborn. It's time to let Mr. Vick return to work.