Oregon has become a case study in what happens when a society loses its moral compass. Last week, supporters of Oregon’s so-called People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act announced they had gathered enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, potentially.
If approved, the measure would effectively criminalize hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock slaughter, and countless ordinary agricultural practices by removing longstanding exemptions from the state’s animal cruelty laws. Supporters have celebrated the proposal as a major step forward for animal rights. Critics have correctly called it an attack on an entire way of life.
The irony is impossible to ignore.
Oregon already boasts some of the most permissive abortion laws in America. There are virtually no gestational limits on abortion, and taxpayers help fund the procedure. An unborn child can be aborted moments before birth, yet under the PEACE Act, catching a trout or harvesting a deer could potentially become a criminal offense.
Think about that for a moment.
A state that protects unlimited abortion is seriously considering legislation that would extend greater legal protections to fish than to unborn children. This isn’t merely political hypocrisy. It reveals a profound confusion about what it means to be human.
For decades, environmental activists have insisted that protecting nature requires fewer people, smaller families, and greater restrictions on human activity. The result has been an environmental movement increasingly disconnected from ordinary Americans. Hunters, anglers, ranchers, farmers, and families who have stewarded the land for generations are now treated as enemies of the planet rather than conservation partners.
The PEACE Act represents the logical endpoint of that worldview.
According to supporters, the initiative would remove legal exemptions that currently allow hunting, fishing, livestock production, animal husbandry, and wildlife management. Its advocates openly acknowledge that their goal is to move society away from using animals for food and other human purposes altogether.
In other words, this is not about conservation.
Conservation recognizes that human beings are part of creation and have a responsibility to care for it wisely. Hunters and fishermen understand this instinctively. The North American conservation model was largely built by sportsmen whose license fees, excise taxes, and volunteer efforts funded habitat restoration and wildlife management. Even today, wildlife agencies depend heavily on revenue generated by hunting and fishing. The PEACE Act rejects that tradition entirely.
Instead, it embraces an ideology that elevates animal life while diminishing human dignity. It is an ideology that sees the problem not as poor stewardship but as humanity itself. This inversion of values has become increasingly common in modern politics.
We see it whenever activists express greater outrage over livestock production than over abortion. We see it whenever environmental organizations embrace scarcity-driven solutions that raise costs for working Americans instead of advancing innovation, energy abundance, and the conditions that allow both communities and creation to flourish.
The message is clear: people are the problem.
But that message rejects the truth of the natural world.
The natural world is not an accident. It is God’s creation. Human beings are not a cancer upon the earth. We are its stewards. The first command given in Scripture was not to eliminate humanity’s presence from creation but to cultivate and care for it responsibly.
That means rejecting both reckless exploitation and radical anti-human environmentalism.
It means recognizing that a father teaching his son to fish is not committing violence against nature. A rancher raising cattle is not waging war on the planet. A hunter harvesting a deer to feed his family is not a criminal.
These are acts that connect people to creation, local communities, and traditions that have sustained human flourishing for generations.
The tragedy is that many Americans now find themselves fighting battles our grandparents would have considered absurd. We are forced to argue that unborn children deserve protection. We are forced to defend basic farming practices. And now, in Oregon, citizens may soon be forced to defend the right to fish.
The deeper issue is not fishing.
The deeper issue is whether our society still recognizes a hierarchy of value that places human dignity at its center.
If a state can protect abortion until birth while moving to criminalize fishing, something has gone terribly wrong.
The PEACE Act may be marketed as compassion. In reality, it reflects a culture increasingly willing to sacrifice human flourishing in pursuit of ideological purity.
Americans should reject it, not because we care less about animals, but because we understand that caring for creation begins with valuing the human person.
