Dear Kathy Rudy - You Aren't Helping

So I was perusing one of my favorite blogs today and came across this link to an editorial by Kathy Rudy, a professor of Women's Studies at Duke who decided to weigh in on the Michael Vick case because - well, I'm not entirely sure why. Vick isn't female, and he's a professional athlete, an affiliation of which Rudy is apparently none too fond....Oh! Right. She's weighing in because of the HYPOCRISY! And the RACISM!

Holy God, but I'm tired of hopped-up pseudo-academics grinding their axes and showing their asses in print.

Apparently Vick was arrested for dogfighting not because it's ILLEGAL, but because he's black. Because dogfighting and cockfighting got outlawed not because folks figured out that it's inherently cruel, but because BLACK PEOPLE started participating.

Wow, if that's the criteria, then Rudy has solved her own animal-rights dilemma. Think eating meat is cruel? Appoint a black person as the next CEO of McDonald's and it'll be outlawed before you can say "Chicken McNuggets!" Hate horse racing? Get Jay-Z to start a farm for thoroughbred racing, and POOF! My friend Flicka and her buddies will be free to roam the plains.

Read it yourself and thrill to the moral equivalence. Unless, like me, you find moral equivalence less "thrilling" and more "evidence of sloppy thought processes - damn you, Rousseau and Derrida!"

But the best part? After going on about how minority participation is why these activities were ruled illegal, Rudy contradicts herself here:

"Whether or not dogs are fought more by minorities than white people is actually unknown, but the media representations of the last several weeks make it appear that black culture and dogfighting are inextricably intertwined. We need to find ways to condemn dogfighting without denigrating black culture with it."

Last time I checked, Michael Vick was not the sole representative of the entirety of black--or even hip-hop--culture. You know, unless you think that all black people behave exactly the same way or something. What's the term for that school of thought again? Hmmmm....give me a minute, it'll come to me.

This is all very simple: dogfighting is illegal. Michael Vick has confessed to participating in a rather large dogfighting operation. Ergo, Michael Vick is in violation of the law and subject to prosecution. You break the law, you risk arrest. The end. You have a problem with that? Work on changing the law.

And leave my chicken nuggets out of it, dammit.

Amusing side note - upon first glance I thought Rudy's title, "ethicist and associate professor," actually read "ELITIST and associate professor."