Go Beyond

If California Governor Gavin Newsom has his way, then California will become the third no-kill state in the country after Delaware and Michigan. To be clear, becoming a no-kill state has absolutely nothing to do with the sanctity of human life. Instead, no-kill measures extend only to dogs and cats.

Newsom wants California to stop euthanizing animals. He believes that no adoptable or treatable dog or cat should be euthanized. To that end, his new budget calls for a $50 million one-time general fund allocation to the University of California’s Koret Shelter Medicine Program. The center would then develop a grant program for animal shelters.

Promoting the protection of animals from being needlessly killed is not objectionable. But, as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council observes, “What is objectionable is the fact that they don’t extend this same compassion to living, breathing babies.” For example, California’s attorney general has argued that killing abortion survivors does not qualify as infanticide.

Newsom is a strong supporter of abortion. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, at least fifteen percent of all abortions in America take place in California. Newsom has even extended an invitation to women from across the nation to come to California to “fully exercise their reproductive rights.”

In addition to having one of the largest taxpayer-funded abortion operations in the country, California legalized assisted suicide. The state allows encouraging suicide to the terminally ill and promulgated a regulation that allows doctors to prescribe death to dying patients who are involuntarily committed in psychiatric hospitals due to mental illness.

Misplaced priorities have led to an inverted morality in California. Sadly, Newsom’s actions are not the first example of what can happen when people lose sight of God’s creative order and fail to understand that human beings exclusively are made in the image of God.

In January 2018, the Swiss passed a law making it illegal to boil a live lobster because these crustaceans can sense pain. And yet, while the government acted in response to the pain of lobsters, it left its abortion laws intact. No consideration for the child in the womb that can feel pain as intensely, if not more so, than lobsters and adults.

Governor Gavin Newsom and his administration have misplaced priorities because they do not understand the sanctity of life in and out of the womb. By working to stop the euthanizing of animals and failing to extend the same consideration to people, they are making California a place where it will be safer to be a dog than a human being created in God’s image.