To them, Margaret falls into the category of avoidable human suffering. At best, a tragic mistake. At worst, a living embodiment of the pro-life movement. Less than human. A drain on society. That someone I love is regarded this way is unspeakably painful to me.

This view is probably particularly pronounced here in blue-state California, but I keep finding it everywhere, from academia on down. At a dinner party not long ago, I was seated next to the director of an Ivy League ethics program. In answer to another guest's question, he said he believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure. (When I started to pipe up about our family's experience, he smiled politely and turned to the lady on his left.)

In ancient Greece, babies with disabilities were left out in the elements to die. We in America rely on prenatal genetic testing to make our selections in private, but the effect on society is the same.

Margaret's old pediatrician tells me that years ago he used to have a steady stream of patients with Down syndrome. Not anymore. Where did they go, I wonder. On the west side of L.A., they aren't being born anymore, he says.

I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families.

The analogy between women and nonhuman animals overlooks the perhaps more crucial comparison between women and farm animals.

Not only men but women and animal protectionists exhibit a culturally-conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female, too "cowlike." Moreover, we regard conscious logical reasoning as the only valid sort of "mind." Evidence that chimpanzees possess such a mind is a primary reason why many are now insisting that they should be granted "human rights." Human rights for chimpanzees? Yes. Human rights for chickens? Meaningless.

This brings in the question of deep ecology. The philosophy of deep ecology, with its emphasis on the ecosphere as a whole, including both sentient and nonsentient beings, presents a salutary challenge to the reductionist logic and homocentric morality of western culture. As the branch of environmentalism that emphasizes the spiritual component of nature and of our relationship to the natural world, deep ecology offers deliverance from the western exfoliative global enterprise based on mechanistic models and unbridled greed of acquisition and inquiry masquerading as progress.

If women feel bludgeoned by this oppressive mentality, how must the animals be affected by it? Let us consider not only the pain that we impose on them, but the moral ecology within which we inflict it--the belittling, sniggering atmosphere of pompous hatred and contempt that we emanate in which countless billions of beings are forced to live. This moral ecology is as distinctive a human contribution to the range of experiences in the world as anything else that our species has conferred.

Dappled Things is a new literary magazine dedicated to providing a space for young writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective. The magazine is committed to quality writing that takes advantage of the religious, theological, philosophical, artistic, cultural, and literary heritage of the Catholic Church in order to inform and enrich contemporary literary culture. Dappled Things pledges complete faithfulness to the teachings of the Catholic Church as expressed by the Bishop of Rome and the Church's Magisterium.

"Any person who shall engage in a duel with any deadly weapon, although no homicide ensue, or who shall challenge another to fight such as duel ... shall be guilty of a felony," says the law, with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

***

Police say the cousins, ages 19 and 31, disagreed Monday over a $30 dollar debt.

The older man brandished a knife and challenged the younger man to fight outside their Mount Clemens home, and the younger man accepted, said Sheriff Mark Hackel.

"He could've done any number of things," Hackel told The Macomb Daily. "He could've called police, he could've fled the area. But he took on the challenge and became part of the problem."

The way I see it, the dueling cousins only did two things wrong.

First, they should have conducted their duel in their home, instead of outside. This alone, might have been enough to afford them with the Constitutional protection of Lawrence v. Texas. As Justice Kennedy explained in Lawrence: "The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other . . . The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives."