I’m no longer shocked by what I read in the news these days. What would have turned people’s stomachs 30 or 40 years ago, now these stories are met with a dismissive “Whatever.” The latest once-thought-to-be moral atrocity has to do with “zoophilia” (from the Greek zōion, meaning “animal,” from which our words zoology and zodiac are derived, and philia, “friendship” or “love,” as in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love) — the practice of sexual activity between humans and animals (bestiality).

I’ve always maintain that a sexual slippery slope follows when the biblical account of marital and sexual relationships is dismissed as primitive, religious, “unscientific,” politically incorrect, and an attempt to “define deviancy down.” Since the Bible condemns bestiality (Ex. 22:19; Lev. 18:23; 20:15–16; Deut. 27:21), it must now be morally acceptable. Whatever is right in the Bible is actually wrong, and what is wrong is now right.

Then there’s the claim that we are animals that have evolved from other animals. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of “Zoophilia”: “the practice of sexual activity between humans and non-human animals.”1 In evolutionary terms, humans are animals. We’re part of an animal continuum. This makes us brothers and sisters with non-human animals. One day, they will be human animals like us, so we need to embrace them as our DNA kin.

So it’s not surprising that Michael Kiok, chairman of ZETA (Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information), argues that a new German law was unfair to the group’s specific sexual proclivities since, as he puts it, “We see animals as partners and not as a means of gratification. We don’t force them to do anything.”

Where did Mr. Kiok get the idea that humans and animals are partners? It’s science. It’s what we’ve been taught since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Science tells us that we are animals not that distant from the apes. Consider the evolutionary claim that the match between chimpanzees and humans is said to be around 97 percent.

Here’s something that surprised me. “Zoophilia was legalized in Germany in 1969. . . .” It’s been animal rights groups that have been fighting for anti-bestiality laws to protect the animals!

“Now the center-right government wants to outlaw using animals ‘for personal sexual activities or making them available to third parties for sexual activities and thereby forcing them to behave in ways that are inappropriate to their species,’ said Hans-Michael Goldmann, chairman of the parliament’s Agricultural Committee.”

What’s the response from the folks at the Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information? It’s about consensual love and the claim that other people’s morality should not be imposed on people with a different moral worldview. “Mere concepts of morality have no business being law,” Mr. Kiok argued. Homosexual and pedophilia groups have argued the same way. With God out of the picture or redefined, anything goes.

A similar argument was used when Nazi war criminals were put on trial. Germany had a different way of looking at morality. Who were these non-German nations to impose their view of morality on them? John Warwick Montgomery writes:

“The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in complete consistency with it, and that they therefore could not rightly be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their conquerors.”2

Germany had a similar problem defining deviant behavior as immoral when it learned that Armin Meiwes ate Bernd Jürgen Brandes. Brandes had responded to the following advertisement that had been posted by Meiwes:

“Looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.”

This was described as a “tricky case . . . because Cannibalism is not a recognised offence under German law” and the defense argued that “since the victim volunteered,” it was not murder.

There is no foundational way to say that anything is wrong in a world where we are repeatedly told that there is no God and we “evolved out of the earliest primordial sludge.”3

1. Emphasis added. [↩]
2. John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Dimension Books/Bethany Fellowship, 1975), 24–25. [↩]
3. “The beginning of life on Earth is a hotly contested area of science (not to mention religion); with current theories focusing on how RNA (ribonucleic acid)-like molecules developed into a more complex form of RNA-based life, which then transformed into cellular life based on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins. Now, an accelerated in vitro experiment shows how an RNA enzyme develops into a DNA enzyme without losing its original function. The experiment, described as an ‘evolutionary conversion,’ is considered a breakthrough, as it presents scientists with a contemporary understanding of how complex life may have evolved out of the earliest primordial sludge.” Kate Melville, “Primordial Soup-In-A-Cup,” Science-A-Go, (March 28, 2006). [↩]