COLUMN RIGHT / JOHN LOFTON : Craziness Among the Highest Order : When animal life takes precedence over human life, it’s moral insanity.

Our country has gone (is going? I don’t want to be dogmatic) morally insane. And nothing better illustrates the national nuttiness than the growing concern for animal rights over the health and welfare of human beings.

All across our nation, living, breathing human beings are being annihilated. Our murder rate is at an all-time high. Our infant-mortality rate is worse than that of East Germany. Almost 30% of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion, which snuffs out the life of an innocent unborn baby.

Meanwhile, get this--although you probably didn’t because the New York Times carried it in a small story at the bottom of Page 8--the leading killer of women in the American workplace is homicide.

Catherine Bell, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta says: “If a woman’s going to die from an injury at work, she’s probably going to be murdered.”

So, what is Patti Davis, the morally myopic daughter of Ronald Reagan, worried about? Why, it’s dolphins. Dolphins! Her heart is bleeding for Flipper! On a recent edition of the tabloid TV show “A Current Affair,” Davis was bemoaning the alleged fact that her-father-the-President’s Administration supposedly ignored the “intent” of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, with the result being, she says, that 20,500 dolphins a year were killed by fishermen fishing for tuna. Davis refers to dolphins as “one of the most intelligent, sentient species on Earth”--which may even be true despite the fact that she says it.

But what I want to know is why Davis, and so many other “celebrities,” are using their thank-God limited public exposure to publicize the plight of some animals but no human beings.

This is moral insanity.

Indeed, our country is so far gone, morally, around-the-bend, that some liberals don’t even seem to know that animals are different from and of an order lower than human beings.

Earlier this year, in a debate about abortion on the Cable News Network’s “Crossfire” program, a pro-life guest noted that an abortion kills a little baby whose heart has already started beating. The show’s liberal co-host, Michael Kinsley, replied, in part: “All right. A cow’s heart also beats.”

A cow’s heart also beats? A cow? ! The animal that goes moo-moo? Yep, that’s what the Harvard-educated Kinsley said. But what, in the name of all that is sacred, does a cow have to do with an unborn baby?

The mind boggles.

This comparison is moral insanity.

And there are, alas, numerous other examples of our coast-to-coast craziness. Down in Austin, Tex., when some nutcake poisons to death a 500-year-old oak tree, he’s arrested. The news reports advise that for this tree-trashing the man could be sentenced to life in prison on this felony charge of criminal mischief because he had a previous conviction for burglary.

Life imprisonment for tree-murder? Give us a break! Violent criminals all across this country commit far more serious “criminal mischief” than offing an oak, and they never spend one day in the slammer.

This is moral insanity.

I read a jewelry store ad that said ear-piercing was free with the purchase of earrings; “parental consent,” however, was required if the piercee is under 18 years of age. Wonderful. But in many states, if a minor child, one under 18, wants to get an abortion--if she wants to get her living, breathing baby pierced to death--no parental consent is required.

This is moral insanity.

A final example from the news--though I could fill this page with them: Four Soviet scholars have asked four American Christian professors to help them study the Ten Commandments. The Soviets say that they are searching for a system that has an absolute basis, a deep respect for human life and human dignity and a nurturing of human liberty and responsibility. Amen.

Meanwhile, in our country, which, increasingly, lacks all of these things, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of all public schools in that state. And the high court did this even though copies of the Commandments were purchased by private contributions.

This is moral insanity.

If anybody out there in the asylum thinks he or she has a lucid rationale for all of this moral madness, I’d love to hear it.