- FILED UNDER
- Rekha Basu
The Iowa House of Representatives' ethics committee recently decided that deliberate misrepresentation was defensible if it had a higher ethical purpose. The committee cleared Rep. Clel Baudler of violations for posing at a California pharmacy as a hemorrhoid sufferer to get a prescription for marijuana. He had wanted to show how easily a medical marijuana law could be abused. In discussing the ruling, committee member Scott Raecker said that some lying has an ethical purpose: "If Anne Frank were in my attic and the Nazis were at my door asking, that's a tough question, but I believe I would lie to them for the greater good."
So it's surprising that both Baudler and Raecker - or, for that matter, anyone who voted to clear Baudler - would vote for House File 589, and not see their stance on exposing another kind of abuse as contradictory.
Sixty-six Iowa representatives last week voted to pass a bill to criminalize recording, in picture or sound, inside factory farms and animal-breeding facilities. Sponsored by a cattle farmer and supported by the meat industry, the bill sets escalating penalties for making, owning or distributing sound or video recordings, or pictures, inside their operations. Angered by secretly filmed videos depicting mistreatment of farm animals, they want to prevent animal-rights activists from getting hired just to secretly record abuses. Among the images are cows being shocked, pigs being beaten and chicks ground alive.
One can understand why the industry wouldn't want them out there. Many of us who eat meat prefer not to think about the process employed to get it. But as recent films like "Food, Inc." suggest, if we saw the unhealthy or inhumane conditions under which animals are raised, or considered the genetic alterations that make chickens, for example, unnaturally large-breasted, we might think twice. Accordingly, the handful of corporations that control meat production go to extreme lengths to prevent negative press - including a now famous lawsuit against Oprah Winfrey (which she won) for saying she couldn't trust hamburger.
Iowa law already prevents trespass, fraud and property defacement. If fraudulent employment is a problem for the meat industry, maybe it should do better at screening prospective hires. This proposed law smacks of attempted intimidation.
It also begs a question of the slaughterhouse and puppy mill owners lobbying for it: What's going on inside the facilities that you would go to such lengths to prevent people from seeing?
And why would lawmakers, who are supposed to represent the public interest, do the industry's bidding by passing legislation that doesn't serve consumers or animals? What's so special about animal operations that they deserve extra protections, when other industries get by with the laws we have?
Could it be the meat industry's wealth and political power?
Hidden cameras have long been a tool of journalists and filmmakers to spread awareness about human rights abuses in such facilities as insane asylums. Without them, it would be harder to generate public interest in lobbying for changes. Author Barbara Ehrenreich took jobs as a Walmart clerk, waitress and nurse's aide to expose conditions facing America's low-wage workers in her eye-opening book, "Nickel and Dimed." As consumers and taxpayers who help subsidize some of those businesses, we should know what we're paying for.
True, if we knew more about meat production, we might eat less meat. But maybe we should. It's not lawmakers' job to protect a particular industry by preventing us
