Oh no, not at all. As you can see from the interview, he's just a modest, humble, down-home, aw-shucks kind o' guy. He'd never even think of running for political office, of being in the spotlight. He can't understand why people make so much out of his ideas. He's just your average joe who's smarter than the rest of us, who thinks carefully about all this stuff, is peaceful, minds his own business. The rest of us are stoooooooopid, extremists, too dumb to see how calm and careful and nuanced he is. He'd never stoop to becoming a political advocate of this stuff. That's beneath him. He's urbane, above the fray, thoughtful.
He thinks he's doing a far more important Mission by providing the careful, sophisticated, urbane, elegant argumentation for baby-killing and bestiality.
See, he doesn't advocate bestiality and he'd never do it himself.
He just provide Princeton-level cover for the beastie-boys.
You may think I'm just poking fun. I'm deadly serious. Unless we understand how he understands himself and how his fellow liberal and Ivy-League wannabee, NYTimes reading "sophisticates" of our society understand him and understand themselves, we're fighting with one arm tied behind our backs.
We should not demonize him. His ideas are indeed demonic, but we have to understand that he sees himself and a lot of people see him as the urbane, sophisticated, cool, calm, collected, wise guy. Hate the sin but respect the sinner is important here. Demonize his ideas but be careful not to portray him as a fool or demon. I'm not saying you, theDentist did that. You were just trying to make a point by making a joke and that's fine.
But I am saying that some of the people who protest him do fall into the trap of focusing too much on him as a person.
... I wouldn't mind laying to rest the onslaught of semantics by which Peter Singer, PETA and others might consider my dog a person but not the handicapped with whom I've worked or known throughout my life. I don't know, of course, if that's the direction you're headed but I'm certainly curious to know what you mean.
--another poster
PETA, wow, that didn't even go through my mind, though, now that you mention it, my vegetarian cousin who 'won't eat anything with a face' (though she'll eat a McDonald's fish sandwich in a pinch--I guess its square brown form is sufficiently unfishlike) seems to think her dog is a person. It's true that animals have varying degrees of consciousness, of experiencing and expressing emotion. For this reason one shouldn't be cruel to them. It doesn't mean we shouldn't eat them. It just means we shouldn't act like a cat before doing so.
No, I'm referring to the fact that personhood, in terms of a unique personality and self-awareness, is an aspect of being human that develops somewhere between conception and the first few years of life. It's inherent in our nature but, like sexual maturity, is something that develops in its own due course. It's something that can be altered or destroyed by drugs or disease (both genetic and otherwise); however, it's not something upon which stands or falls one's right to life.
This distinction is misused by those who call for pulling the plug on brain-dead adults and then reason that the lack of adult-like brain activity in a fetus is sufficient reason for pulling its plug. They reason superficially. The reason pulling the plug on the brain-dead is seen by many as acceptable is because it's virtually certain that the brain-dead will never again regain consciousness. However, in the case of the fetus, it's virtually certain that it will become conscious, become aware, develop a personality, and be able to enter into relationships with other people. It's a natural consequence of development. But its humanity underlies and precedes its personhood. Its right to life is based on its being human, not just being a person. This is why people want to shift the focus to 'person', such as when they ask, "Just when does a fetus become a person with Constitutional rights?" They've begged the question. They play off the qualitative aspect of defining a 'person' in order to ignore the absolute fact of life. This qualitative game has always been used by people in power to define others out of existence. Such a distinction should be acknowledged for the purpose of showing up their 'quality of life' game for what it is--a means of having things their way regardless of the consequences for others.
Such a distinction is at the heart of the old moral view vs utilitarian view of capital punishment. Moral: Someone may forfeit his life because he broke contract with the rest of human society. Utilitarian: Capital punishment is just a means of ridding society of undesirable elements or of serving as a deterrent to undesirable behavior. The unborn fetus has not even had a chance to enter into society. The quality of life crowd permit abortion as a means of a woman ridding herself of an undesirable element in her life.
On the other hand, even those who are flat-out materialists recognize that there could be persons who are not human. There is a hope among many that there exist, somewhere out there in the universe, other intelligent beings which would have the status of being persons or people. Others, whose worldview is not so limited, also acknowledge this possibility but also recognize that God is a person, though not a human being, except as he lived as Jesus. The created spiritual beings known as messengers or guardians or--for those who have gone over to the other side--as demons, are persons, though not human beings.
For some strange reason, the thought of someone not human from the vicinity of Betelgeuse delights the first group whereas the thought of someone not human whose being transcends nature disgusts/angers/frightens them. I suppose that in the first instance they could think, "Well, if necessary, it's them or us". But in the second, there's nothing they can do. Someone said that man's greatest fear was being alone in the universe. I don't think so. I think man's greatest fear is that he's not alone, that there's someone else's will he's expected to live up to, that he doesn't want to do so, and is both frightened and pissed off that he's going to be held responsible for it. Isn't that remarkably like "Hey, who the hell do you think you are, trying to impose your morality on me by telling me I can't have an abor--uh... a right to choose!" while imposing something far more severe than morality on those who literally depend on them for life?