One of the lesser-known propositions on the ballot this year is the Humane Society-backed Proposition B in Missouri, which would establish minimum standards for how dog breeders can treat their animals.  The objective is to eliminate the appalling conditions found in the state’s 3,000 puppy mills (30% of the country’s total, according to the Humane Society).

Needless to say, wherever there is an effort to eliminate cruelty and exploitation in the name of profit, you will always find conservatives right there to oppose it.

In this case, it’s the Missouri Tea Party and the Orwellonymic “Alliance for Truth,” which has Joe The Plumber Legal Scholar blogging screeds for them about how the Humane Society is “cowardly hiding behind animal cruelty” to “[take] our constitutional rights away.”  Which presumably means that animal abuse is a constitutional right and same-sex marriage is not.  Or something.

But as ridiculous as the conservatives’ all-purpose “constitutional right” argument is, it pales in comparison to the one the Alliance for Truth dropped on TPM.  In the long and storied history of phony pretzel-logic right-wing arguments, this is surely one of the all-time greats:

Anita Andrews from Alliance For Truth told TPM that it’s a “deceptive, lying bill” that is “trying to purposefully get rid of the breeders.” The state of Missouri, she said, has been given a bad rap as “the puppy mill capitol” of the U.S. but “in truth we have the best ribbon breeders in the country.” And, Andrews said, the state already has anti-cruelty laws on the books.

“They don’t like animals,” she said of the Humane Society of the United States.

That’s right, the Humane Society wants to shut down the puppy mills because they hate dogs so much that they want to prevent any more of them being born.  Those bastards!!!  Why, they’re probably the same big-government dog-hating busybodies who made it illegal for these proud animals to prove their mettle on the field of competitive endeavor!

But why do I have this strange sense of deja vu…

The [“Black children are an endangered species.”] billboards… were created in conjunction with a new Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com, which says that all of Georgia’s abortion clinics are in “urban areas where blacks reside.” The Web site connects abortion to segregation, saying that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination.”

Ah yes.  It’s pretty much the same argument, only even uglier.  They would have us believe that there is absolutely nothing females – human or canine – want more than to be pregnant and having babies all the time, so any effort to improve quality of life and slow down the pace of reproduction must therefore be a shadowy population control plot by liberals who hate them.  Because believing that is so much easier than trying to understand what words like “compassion,” “empathy,” and “dignity” might mean.