I was not really familiar with the Ag-Gag laws that various states are enacting. In Washington, it falls to hero of freedom, Representative Joe Schmick to take up this noble cause.
“I view it as a way to protect the farmer,” Rep. Schmick was quoted as saying in the Capital Press. “You can edit anything to make it look really bad.” (Rep. Schmick has ties to ALEC and, as of 2010, was listed as a member of its national “energy, environment, and agriculture task force.”)
That is literally true of any topic. But the great thing is that if you feel that speech isn’t right or good or just, instead of appealing to the state to squash it, you can respond if you like. Or you can just ignore it. Or — and I know this is way out there — you can respond to criticism in a way that maybe improve practices so that it’s less likely you get caught doing bad things in the future. And you become better.
[Edited — Off Topic]
The funny thing is, if you research this topic, you’ll find the farmers who were fined for things like picking up and dropping cows with forklifts, smashing pigs’ heads against concrete floors, etc., were really guilty of what the undercover videos documented. So ag-gag laws are really about criminals objecting to being caught.
What ALEC, Republican legislators, and the agricultural corporations they’re pandering to really want to do is criminalize the reporting of livestock abuse. Kinda like cops who arrest people for filming them violating citizens’ civil rights (by, for example, choking them to death, or smashing their faces into concrete walls). It smacks of North Korea, Stalinist Russia, and Nazi Germany.
The ag-gag laws aren’t aimed at ordinary citizens. There’s a war raging between the agriculture industry and animal welfare groups like PETA. A recent Mother Jones article gives you the flavor of what’s going on. It begins,
“SHAWN LYONS WAS DEAD TO RIGHTS—and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.
“The recordings caught one senior worker beating a sow repeatedly on the back with a metal gate rod, a supervisor turning an electric prod on a sow too crippled to stand, another worker shoving a herding cane into a sow’s vagina. In one close-up, a distressed sow who’d been attacking her piglets was shown with her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils “to get the animal high.” In perhaps the most disturbing sequence, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor—a technique known as “thumping.” Their bloodied bodies were then tossed into a giant bin, where video showed them twitching and paddling until they died, sometimes long after. Though his actions were not nearly as vicious as those of some coworkers who’d been fired immediately, Lyons knew, as the video quickly became national news, that the consequences for him could be severe.”
Of course, what happened as a result of PETA’s undercover operation at MowMar Farms was the owner stayed in business by promising to clean things up and blaming the lowly workers, who were crucified for MowMar’s sins.
http://www.motherjones.com/env.....wmar-farms
Organizations like PETA send activists out to farms to apply for jobs, work in the barns, and secretly videotape and document what they observe there. They’re spies. When they catch a farm operation abusing livestock, the farmer can lose his reputation, business, and livelihood. Not surprisingly, the farm community feels threatened by these activists.
The conservative solution, as drafted into model legislation by ALEC and pushed through the legislative process by Republican legislators, is to make it a felony to get a farm job under false pretenses for the purpose of exposing livestock abuse.
I don’t think I need to comment any further; that speaks for itself.
To be fair to Republicans, by pushing ag-gag laws, they’re only trying to shield farmers (one of their favorite constituencies) from animal welfare activists, and so far as I know they’re not pushing the underlying concept of these laws as a general principle, so it’s not really fair to extrapolate from it any intent to restrict other forms of speech. Not yet, anyway. But I do think there’s a legitimate concern that if these laws catch on, and aren’t struck down by the courts, Republicans — a few at first, and then eventually many — may be tempted to extend them beyond farms to other kinds of speech they want to suppress. In fact, we’re already getting a taste of that in a few red states where they want to criminalize voter registration drives. So, yes, it’s a slippery slope and ag-gag laws could be the snowball at the top of the hill. Even restricted to farms, these laws are terrible, and the larger possibilities make it imperative to nip this trend in the bud. Democrats should make defeating this type of legislation one of their highest priorities.
Hey soon these folks will object to kids reading “Charlotte’s Web.” This book will have to be gagged and banned or it could be under these ag laws.
I’ll be interested to see how that great protector of animals and ASPCA sweetheart, Pam Roach, votes on this.
Schmick says “You can edit anything to make it look really bad.”
He knows this is true because James O’Keefe taught him how.