In some ways, I tend to think like the "conservatives" on this particular issue, I'm afraid. I personally am not a "bleeding heart". Even though I like to think human beings are capable of great nobility and altruism, it's not been on display too often throughout human history. For every Albert Schweitzer, there are a thousand Pinochets. For every Gandhi, there are countless Mansons. For every anonymous citizen who "does the right thing", there are millions more of the callous and indifferent variety. Whether we're talking about the Holocaust, or the Spanish Inquisition, or what the English did to the Irish, or the Americans to the Indians and the slaves they kidnapped from Africa, or what Idi Amin did to his people, or Stalin to his, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc, or Catherine De Medici, or Pinochet, or Mengele, or Kang Sheng, or Lavrenty Berea, or Manson, or...the list of barbarism goes on and on, distressingly endless. Sometimes when we characterize a particularly repellent human action as "animalistic", it's an insulting disservice to animals. They don't act as human beings do. They don't kill pointlessly, as humans do; they don't inflict the atrocities on their own kind that we human beings inflict on each other. Yesterday, I was told by a relative in north NJ about a local news story where a man sodomized his 2-month old son to death, blaming his actions on alcohol and drugs. What animal does that to its young? I do think that human beings need to continually strive towards being as civilized and progressive as we're capable of, but sometimes you read or hear about a story like the one I just mentioned, and you have to wonder whether any of it is worth it? Then again, what's the alternative?