Whoopi Goldberg used her first day on the daytime chat show "The View" Tuesday to defend football star Michael Vick in his dogfighting case. Goldberg said that "from where he comes from" in the South, dogfighting isn't that unusual. "It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico," she said. "There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country." (Quote from BreitBart.Com).
1. "In the South, dogfighting isn't that unusual". Uh, yeah, it is unusual.
2. "It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico". Right, it IS like cockfighting.
It is unfathomable that a woman whose recent ancesters were forced into slave labor would defend the enslavement of animals forced into raw fighting like gladiators for human entertainment. It would be ironic if it weren't so sad. Of course, she may have taken this position out of a desire to stand out in the crowd on the show. If so, it shows a serious lack of judgment on which topics to pick a contrarian view. Either way, it's indefensible to come down on the side of promoting such cruelty to fellow mammals simply to entertain oneself. Let's hope it was a lack of thinking rather than a healthy dose of it that brought her to that position.
The photo is one I found showing a dogfight in Afghanistan. I also found photos taken in East Asia and the US. It seems Ms. Goldberg is right in that the practice is widespread. Could social acceptence of such practice contribute to higher levels of other forms of violence?
Oh, and cockfighting isn't very nice either.
1 comment:
Michael Vick isn't really from the South. He's from the Tidewater area of Virginia, which is really part of the megalopolis that runs from there all the way up the eastern seaboard.
Whoopi, who is actually Caryn Johnson, of NYC, makes the common error of stereotyping the South as all one place.
I think the dogfighting that Vick was a part of comes more out of the black ghetto "gangsta" culture than anything else.
I agree that Whoopi is drawing the wrong cultural lines in very stereotyped ways.
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