The Constitution of the United States is at best an incomplete document, and is constantly open to revision by both legitimate amendment and often questionable rewriting via the judiciary. The constitutions of the 50 states in this country usually try to emulate that flexibility, but few have the same lasting success.

Furthermore, the legislative processes at the state level are often very slow. With most states having part-time, non-professional legislatures — at least in the sense that you can’t simply be a legislator as your main source of income if you plan to live long — it’s hard to get true analysis of hot-button issues that end up determining how states’ citizens live their lives. Seat belt laws, speed limits, funding for state police forces or highway patrols; these are all issues that greatly affect most of us, much like Oklahoma’s recently passed ban on cockfighting.

For those of you unfamiliar with this sport of kings, I’ll describe it. Cockfighting consists of specially bred roosters pecking each other to death or using their razor-sharp spurs on each other, all while people bet on it.

Oklahoma’s citizenry passed a referendum banning cockfighting narrowly with a 54-46 split, becoming the 48th state in the Union to do so, creating a moment where I desperately wished I’d accepted those scholarships to Texas A&M so I could comment on how cockfighting could replace football as the sport that Oklahoma can’t play. Alas, Oklahoma still slaughtered us, and as such, I will remain silent.

However, a quick-thinking judge acted on a challenge to the ban, and all of us that aren’t roosters can breathe a little easier now, because the ban has been suspended, preventing police from charging those who are found to hold cockfights, train gamecocks to fight or — get this — possess paraphernalia of cockfighting, with a felony.

Why on earth would the ban be challenged? In a Reuters news release, challengers to the ban claim that it’s unfair, leaving them only a number of days to find a new way of making a living, and also cite the overbreadth of the law. However, the challenge is a constitutional one, claiming that in some way individuals’ rights are being trampled on by banning cockfighting. I’d have a hard time even reading that into a constitution, and I doubt Oklahoma’s preamble begins “We the people who love killing chickens.”

It’s one thing if we lived in a world where chickens were all about pecking each other to death. If they just loved doing this and spoke to us, pleading to be put in a circle of death, maybe it’d be convincing.

But there is one question that keeps the situation from being clear-cut. What’s the difference between me eating a rooster courtesy of Tyson or putting it in a pit with the rooster equivalent of Mike Tyson? They both end up dead because of things I did. Is it more savage to just lop chickens’ heads off and let them run around as they die than it is to simply train them to kill each other?

Answer: yes. The difference isn’t huge. It’s not like the chicken you eat for dinner should be thanking you for saving it from the ring, and perhaps I only found this difference to put my chicken-devouring soul at ease, but I can’t say they’re the same.

For instance, think of an analogous situation. Say I happen to need a kidney transplant and someone dies, leaving me one spotless, beautiful, life-giving kidney. I haven’t personally killed this person, though I am certainly getting massive benefits out of his death. Even worse, suppose this person is a child who died only because someone whose wife died while waiting for an organ transplant has gone around running down children so their organs could save older people.

The problem is, the kid’s dead, and I can’t help that even if I want to. My demand for organs has led this particular wacko to go around running down kids with his SUV, but I’m not carrying out the action.

Now say I need a kidney transplant and I find a perfect donor and convince him to drink Drano. Clearly, I’m not only at fault, but will also only need my kidney until they can get my spot on death row nice and warm.

Having disposed of that question, what claims can we honestly make to have cockfighting be a constitutionally protected right? Let’s be honest. Laws that keep us from messing up other people or animals aren’t paternalistic. This isn’t like a law against something you do to yourself. You’re not likely to die from a tragic cockfighting accident, even if you train them for years.

As for you cock farmers and ranchers, it’s rough. You have to totally rearrange your lives in a span of mere days once this ban is reinstituted. Just think how hard it must have been for Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad or Jeffrey Dahmer. Poor guys. As soon as the cops show up, they have to drop everything they’d worked so hard to achieve. You’d think we have something against criminals, even those who slaughter helpless roosters.

That’s what I’d call injustice, if it weren’t so darn, well, just.

Tim Kearns

is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.