Oregon Democrats: A Parody of Liberals

I cannot imagine a worse or stupider ballot measure than what Oregon liberals are trying to push here. Evidently, Democrats never want to win a rural voter ever again:

A proposed ballot measure that would effectively ban hunting, fishing and other animal-related activities in Oregon failed to qualify for the November ballot based on an initial review of 1,000 submitted signatures.

But the measure is far from dead. The Secretary of State’s Office is now reviewing a larger batch of signatures submitted in support of the initiative to determine whether it will move forward.

A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office and a chief petitioner for the initiative confirmed that it failed to clear the initial review. Willamette Week first reported the news on Thursday.

Initiative Petition 28 would remove many exemptions from Oregon animal cruelty laws that apply to various recreational and occupational activities. In practice, it would prohibit hunting, fishing, slaughtering livestock, pest control, conducting scientific research on animals, using animals in rodeos, operating commercial poultry businesses and castrating or neutering livestock, among other activities.

Backers of the controversial effort say it would grant all animals the same protections that currently apply to house pets.

Opponents, including a growing list of Republican and Democratic state politicians, say it would hurt Oregonians whose work or livelihoods depend on animal-related activities, such as ranchers and veterinarians.

Between late 2024 and early this month, the campaign behind the measure submitted 142,784 signatures. Although that is higher than the 117,173 signatures required for the measure to qualify, a portion of signatures for ballot initiatives are typically thrown out for various reasons, such as duplicates.

I hope this doesn’t make the ballot. I hate it for so many reasons. First, it’s stupid. There is nothing wrong with hunting. You want to ban trapping? OK. And I don’t actually like hunting, not personally. But there’s no pure nature. Everything is now managed and if you had no hunting, that’s still a management choice, not a pure state of nature. There are too many deer as it is, for one thing. If you aren’t going to bring wolves back to the entire nation, well, you need an apex predator of some kind for ecological balance, among other things. And lest one think I don’t mean this, I am a huge cat person. I love my cat and I always want to have cats in my life. I also think there should be a campaign to humanely kill or at least neuter stray cats in order to maintain bird populations that those little cute fluffy murderous bastards decimate.

Second, so much of contemporary liberalism is about extremist visions of individualistic rights instead of anything collective at all. Let’s extend legal rights to the animals and trees has been a thing in some environmental communities for a long time now and while one can see the point to an extent from an intellectual perspective, it’s quite telling how much more attention this kind of increasingly abstracted individualism can get over, say, collective economic rights where ballot measures could also make a big difference. The almost obscene levels of romanticism that go along with this strain of animal rights activism plays right into this kind of individualism. It ain’t Bambi out there folks.

Third, do certain sectors of liberals just want to be a stereotype and never win another rural voter ever again? This is politically nightmarish as policy and as politics. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets tons of rural people all riled up, but instead of some made up bullshit, this would be actual Oregon liberals deciding that they had to get this on the ballot.

Fourth, I hate ballot measures. Oregon has been full of this kind of idiocy for decades. Oregon and Colorado can play their annual game of who has the stupidest ballot measures. Groups behind this hire people to collect them on the streets. You can’t walk the University of Oregon campus without being inundated with ballot collectors. When I was in college and had to go to the bookstore, I’d stop for a second near the corner and survey the field. I’d go straight to where some other poor bastard was engaged by one of these paid signature collectors so I could get by without having to tell them to leave me alone. The entire process is part of the fetish for direct democracy held by a whole lot of liberals who don’t really think through what this kind of thing can mean, not so much in terms of my annoyance, but the horribly written ballot measures that then pass and are thrown out by the courts or are utterly unworkable or are countered by some other ballot measure. We elect representatives for a reason. They might suck, but they suck less than the average voter.

Good lord people. Can we have some clue about how to build a political coalition? Let’s hope that this measure does not make the ballot. For all the reasons listed above.