Why I Won’t Join NOW or PETA
You might think I’d be the perfect candidate for these two groups.
Feminist? Check.
Pro-Choice? Check.
Vegetarian? Check.
Animal-rights activist? Check.
And yet I refuse to be associated with either organization. This is due to experiences I had over fifteen years ago in the early 1990s, but they are still relevant today. Check it.
I went to a NOW recruitment meeting and they talked about pro-life women in unreasonably harsh tones. Called them backwards and narrow-minded and responsible for most of the misogyny in the world. One speaker even singled out Catholic women as being particularly weak.
Even though I hadn’t considered myself Catholic in years and the religion deserves a great deal of criticism, I didn’t appreciate her condemnation of a whole group of women, many of whom I’m related to. I told her that Catholic, pro-life women were the ones who taught me to be strong and independent.
Then I walked away.
Around the same time, I actually belonged to PETA. I would regularly sneak into grocery stores to place “Warning: Tested on Animals” stickers on L’Oreal and Gillette products.
Because they tested on animals.
I believed then, as I do now, that animals were not put on this earth for our entertainment, exploitation, or consumption.
Then PETA ran an ad comparing the slaughter of chickens to the slaughter of Jews during WWII.
I know.
That ad offended me as a historian, free-thinking adult, human being, and Jewish woman.
So I walked away from PETA, too.
Both groups are in the midst of a huge membership campaign. If you are solicited, I respectfully submit a few organizations that are more worthy of support.
Animal Rights – The Humane Society
Women’s Rights -V-Day
That is all.
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Catherine Durkin Robinson
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Good for you. Think for yourself and let the propagandists whither. The environmental movement has a long track record of this sort of behavior.
Good stuff.
Peta = people eating tasty animals….LOL..an old sat night live skit…sorry…still love me?
Hey, sometimes I don’t want to even go to family get-togethers because some of them can such assholes.
But in movement organizations, the most active tend to be the most radical and they feed on the radicalism until it gets wayyy out there.
That’s why I’ll support specific actions-go to a march, donate food, etc-rather than donating to an organization. One thing that I got from one of my bouts with college education is that the primary goal of any organization is continued existence of the organization, not the causes they espouse.
However, as a fellow “recovering Catholic” and sometime agnostic, who, exactly, put animals on this Earth for any purpose?
Just wondering…