Now here’s a disturbing piece largely attempting to justify, within a legal framework, the persecution of the Differently Animated, while warning potential persecutors about possible legal liability:

Let me interrupt our regular programming to ponder some of the legal issues raised by the sudden appearance of zombie hordes.

Zombies have absolutely no control over their actions. Whatever makes “us”…us is destroyed in them, and only the most primitive parts of the brain stem remain active in zombies…the part that needs to feed on you. But some studies suggest that violent criminals also have damaged pre-frontal lobes — the area of the brain that regulates behavior and helps keep society “civilized.” And yet we put these “monsters” on trial and many of them go on to lead long lives eating jello in prison and reading racy magazines. Of course, we selectively execute some of them, too.

Believe it or not, it gets worse, with a disquieting discussion about some rather heinous medical experimentation, in graphic detail:

Know thy enemy. Should we be able to medically experiment on zombies the way the Japanese experimented on the Chinese or the Nazis on Jews? There are a lot of things we should know about zombies if we’re going to survive them: How long can they “live” without food or water? Can we kill it with fire? Can we kill it with chemicals? Can they swim? Can we remove their teeth so that they’re more like harmless old people? Do their fingernails keep growing? Can they survive punctures to certain parts of their brains? How well can they see, hear, smell in the dark or at a distance? Zombies obviously cannot give their legal consent to any medical procedures. But they’re also not exactly human anymore. Still, we as a society no longer condone things like forced electroshock therapy on the mentally ill even if they’ve committed horrendous crimes. And many people oppose the use of animals in medical experiments for the same reason – they cannot consent. Nobody is quite sure, either, of how much pain certain animals can feel. If zombies are like the mentally ill or like animals, what gives us the moral right to experiment on them for our own knowledge?

This is really grisly and unsettling stuff, but it all comes back to the premise outlined at the start: Zombies are not People, therefore we have to put them in a non-human legal framework, or at least, class them along with people who have sharply diminished legal rights, like the severely mentally ill or dangerously criminal.

Now, longtime readers of the ZRC blog know that’s not the case. Zombies are a widely variable community, not the cookie-cutter savages portrayed in The Walking Dead.

Zombies participate in politics:

Zombies attend public gatherings, peacefully:

Zombies even raise money for charity or other worthy causes, as we’ve documented numerous times here on the blog.

So naturally, the ZRC believes the question shouldn’t be, ‘How can we best manage and/or oppress Zombies’, but ‘How do we peacefully meld the Living and Undead Communities?’. Truth be told, sound legal advice from a sympathetic mind would be of great help in this struggle.

Hmm. I wonder…

PS: Just as an aside, if you, at any point in time, find yourself pondering, ‘Should I be able to do X that the Nazis did to the Jews?’, X being any proposed course of action: you are deep into the Dark Side.

Just a handy FYI.

Tags: Academia, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, December 15th, 2011 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.