Matt is one of my favorite bloggers. Today he addressed the reaction people have shown to the killing of Cecil the Lion compared to the reaction to the same day videos of Planned Parenthood dissecting an aborted baby for its salable parts. I won't post the entire piece though I do recommend it. The final paragraphs say a great deal about the issue, however, and deserve attention.

"You might wonder how progressives choose their new devils and new gods. Why Walter Palmer? Why Cecil the Lion? Well, there’s a randomness to it, of course. And there are always the superfluous reasons, like the fact that most of the members of the lynch mob probably have fond memories of “The Lion King.” But I think, more fundamentally, progressives choose to care about lions because lions are an abstraction. They care about the idea of lions.

Real lions are all the way in Africa, or else contained in zoos. You can go and see them, or watch them on TV, or read about them, but crucially, lions will never ask anything from us. Our affection for them presents no challenges. We don’t have to accommodate them. I can say I love lions, but this love will never require me to do anything. Lions will never inconvenience me. They’ll never get in my way. I can defend the lives of lions by angrily Tweeting about hunters, and then I can go on my way, live however I want, and never be asked to change my lifestyle for their sake.

People, on the other hand, are real. They are here. They impose themselves on our lives. They burden us. They surround us. To care about people is hard. It requires us to live, act, think, and speak differently. We have to accommodate people. We have to tolerate people. We have to do things for people, especially the most vulnerable and helpless people. It’s no coincidence that progressivism advocates abortion to deal with children, and euthanasia to handle the old and the infirm. If it is going to pretend to love human beings at all, it must first get rid of the most burdensome types.

It can be hard to love people. And if you say you love people, life is going to constantly demand that you prove it. If you say you love people, you certainly can’t kill your own child, and you can’t support the killing of children, and even if you don’t have kids, you have to be patient and kind with other people’s kids, and other people generally. This is very different from loving lions. You can love lions passively, in the abstract; people must be loved actively, in reality.

If ever some deranged terrorist transported thousand of lions into our neighborhoods, forcing us to actually love lions in some real and present sense, I can guarantee the progressive affection for the species would vanish rapidly.

This is the progressive modus operandi. Progressivism loves everything that can be loved lazily or indulgently, and nothing that must be loved sacrificially and earnestly. It loves nothing that requires any action on its part.

Put more simply, it loves nothing.

But it will keep pretending anyway."

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/so...an-dead-people/