Monday - April 27, 2015

Chimpanzees Are Now Legal Persons With Rights

Here’s a dose of over-the-top. 

On Monday, a New York judge appeared to grant two chimpanzees a writ of habeas corpus. In other words, the chimps have the right to a day in court—under a law that only applies to people.

Last week, a revolutionary decision was made in a U.S. court: chimpanzees were acknowledged to have rights of their own.

It is the first time legal rights of any kind have ever been accorded to anything other than a human.

Here’s the “reasoning” as explained by Simon Barnes, wildlife writer for The Daily Mail.

The fact is that chimpanzees really are almost human. It’s a truth that humankind has tried to ignore ever since Charles Darwin declared in 1871 that humans were related to the apes of Africa.

Modern genetic studies have shown that this relationship is much closer than people thought. We have nearly 99 per cent of our genetic material in common.

And if that one-and-a-bit per cent is unquestionably significant, the rest of it takes a fair amount of thinking about. Chimpanzees are more closely related to us than to their — or should it be our — fellow apes, the gorillas and orangutangs.

It has been suggested that humans and chimpanzees belong not just in the same family, but in the same genus: in other words, the only correct way to understand the human connection to other species is to accept that humans are a species of chimpanzee . . . or chimp-anzees are a species of human.

And if that sounds fantastic, cast your mind back. Some statements made about race — statements that are shocking now — were once accepted as good sense: ‘There is a physical difference between the White and the Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.’ That was Abraham Lincoln in 1858.

One more: ‘The mental constitution of the negro is . . . normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of a servant a dog- like fidelity . . .’ That’s from Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911.

That’s the gist of it.  They’re close enough to qualify according to the logic of the heart.  If you don’t agree, then you’re a racist, just like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica or Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s the whole article.  The arguments seem persuasive until you realize that they’re composed almost entirely of emotional opinions and isolated facts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3058268/Why-chimps-human-U-S-court-grants-human-rights-chimpanzees-astonishing-account-naturalist-reveals-animals-like-think.html

Here’s the same court case reported by the Washington Post:
Chimpanzee almost gets habeas corpus — and in any event the Nonhuman Rights Project gets a court hearing

Chimps given human rights by U.S. court for the first time (sort of)

Do these people have any objective other than the destruction of Western Civilization?

Doc

Posted by Dr. Jeff     on 04/27/2015 at 07:20 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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