Rights, properly understood are moral entitlements embodied in law to protect all people. They are not earned; they come as part of the package of being a member of the human race. This principle was most eloquently enunciated in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This doctrine of human exceptionalism has been under attack in recent decades from many quarters. For example, many bioethicists in an effort to push eugenics, assisted suicide and infanticide, insist that being human alone does not convey moral value, rather an individual must exhibit “relevant” cognitive capacities to claim the rights to life and bodily integrity. Animal rights ideology similarly denies the intrinsic value of being human while pushing a concept known as “painience.”
Extreme crazy environmentalist are attempting to have equal rights granted to mother nature [Gaia worship], an idea embraced by the United Nations. In many countries they have succeeded. Ecuador ratified nature rights into its constitution in 2008 granting Pachamama [the Earth Goddess] all rights granted humans while demoting humankind itself to one among the billions of life forms on earth, no more worthy of protection than any other aspect of the natural world. In Ecuador, viruses, bacteria, insects, trees, weeds, snails, snakes, mosquitoes, pond scum, swamps, rats, fish, etc. have a legally enforceable right to exist, persist, and regenerate their vital cycles. The potential harm to humans seems virtually unlimited.
And it’s not just Ecuador, the whole world has gone mad. Switzerland has constitutionally established the intrinsic dignity of individual plants, based on the many similarities they share with humans at the molecular and cellular levels. In 2008 the Spanish Socialist Parliament, pushed by leftist Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, approved a resolution granting human rights to great apes. In 2013 India passed a law that recognizes dolphins as non-human persons, banning captivity. Efforts to recognize dolphins as non-human persons are also in place in Romania and have been discussed by several other countries, the U.S. included. In fact, in the land of fruit and nuts, the city of Malibu, California released a proclamation that stated dolphins and whales “deserve the right to their own freedom and lives.” In 2014 Argentina granted an orangutan the status of non-human person and the freedom to be released from the Buenos Aires zoo.
If you’re not familiar with the terminology “non-human person,” the left-wing nuts of the world use it to mean any creature with some human characteristics, but not enough characteristics to make it a real human, which pretty much could be applied to anything, if you think about it hard enough. The term is now also being tossed around to describe computer programs and robotic devices. It isn’t that these left-wing nuts feel any compassion toward animals, or plants, or robots – they just hate people, which is evident from their push for nature rights [Gaia worship] as an attempt to deny human exceptionalism.
An article in the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovations journal takes the issue very seriously and supports it implementation. Australian law professor Peter Burdon, in From The Rights of Nature Reconsidered, writes that “throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been unthinkable…this is because until the entity in question is recognized as having rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of us, those who are holding rights at the time. This is true for nature, as it was for slaves, women and children at different points in history.”
The core idea behind this anti-human position is atheism – there is no God and therefore humans are just another species in the evolutionary process with no unique dignity or special status on Earth.
If humans are really stupid enough to implement a regime of nature rights and non-human person rights they would by definition be used against us to implement the United Nations Agenda 21,a socialist agenda to regulate every aspect of our lives.
“The nature rights movement is just another war on humans by the crazies that regard humans as public enemy number 1. In recent years, like termites boring into a building’s foundation, to borrow a Suzuki-type metaphor, anti-humanism has degraded environmentalist thinking and advocacy. Indeed, environmental activists today routinely denigrate humans as parasites, viruses, cancers, bacteria, and murderers of the Earth.” Wesley J. Smith
