Deeper into Wonderland

We’ve wandered in with Alice, and it’s getting darker. Amidst all the other characters behaving oddly and twisting words and telling fantastic tales….we now have some people who run things who want to give human rights to apes.

Speaking of mad, Michael Cook comments on MercatorNet.

Ah for the glory days of the Left in the Spanish Civil War!

At least, he said, they had ambition, in a wildly leftist way.

But this?

The latest project of the Spanish Left is animal liberation. With the support of the ruling Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), Spain will become the first country in the world to extend some human rights to apes. From now on, the great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans – will enjoy the right to life, the right to the protection of individual liberty, and the right to prohibition of torture.

Would that it were so for humans. Even the New York Times gets that.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

Ah, there it is. Peter Singer. Of course. The notorious bioethicist who fully supports not only abortion but infanticide by some arbitrary measure of cognitive ability that confers personhood on someone. Or, apparently, some creature.

Speaking of this, Saturday’s guest on ‘America’s Lifeline’ this week will be Professor Robert George, the toughest debate opponent Singer has probably ever faced, and his eminent colleague on the Princeton faculty. George makes the argument brilliantly and totally from reason that any society that defines personhood by relative value and worthiness of rights (or life itself) is morally compromised. To say the least.

Apes with human rights, humans deprived of proper care or starved and dehydrated to death because they are unfit, this is where we are. Prof. George will have plenty to say about where we’re headed, if we don’t find our way out.