Wesley
Smith charges the explicit point of the move is "revolutionary - to demote
human beings from the uniquely valuable species and into merely another animal
in the forest.
By John
Jalsevac
Spain, June
26, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - What began fifteen years ago as a fringe cause of
the most extreme wing of the environmentalist movement has just yesterday been
given an unprecedented level of recognition by the government of a developed
Western nation.
A Spanish
parliamentary committee yesterday gave its support to a resolution that would
grant so-called "great apes" the rights to life, liberty and freedom
from torture.
According
to numerous mainstream reports, the environmental committee's resolution is
supported across party lines and is expected to be passed by parliament,
thereby coming into effect as law.
"This
is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our
evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of
humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project
(GAP). "We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in
Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening."
Should the
committee's resolution become law a major new animal rights precedent would be
established making it illegal in Spain to use apes, including chimpanzees,
bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans in experiments.
According
to a Reuters report, it will also become illegal to keep apes in circuses,
or for the purposes of television commercials or filming.
The
movement to grant apes human rights began in earnest fifteen years ago with the
founding of GAP in 1993. Peter Singer, the same Princeton bioethicist who has
argued that doctors should be permitted to kill newborn infants up to the age
of 30 days old, has been one of the primary intellectual forces behind the
movement.
Since it's
inception GAP has lobbied in favor of a UN Declaration on Great Apes. That
Declaration demands, "the extension of the community of equals to include
all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans.
"The
community of equals is the moral community within which we accept certain basic
moral principles or rights as governing our relations with each other and
enforceable at law."
The list of
"moral principles or rights" includes the three "rights"
included in the Spanish parliamentary committee's resolution. Currently,
however, it is not clear what penalties, if any, would be levied against
an ape should an ape violate these moral principles by, for
example, killing or injuring a human being or another ape in a case
where it was not necessary for self defence.
To those
who have been observing events in Spain these last several years under the
socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, it comes
as no surprise that such an unprecedented resolution would be passed first
in Spain.
Prime
Minister Zapatero's Socialist government has taken Spain from being one of
the most conservative countries in Europe, to being one of the most
"progressive." Since coming into power the Zapatero government has
legalized homosexual "marriage", marginalized the Catholic Church and
the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage on the whole, opened access to abortion,
and otherwise embraced nearly every anti-life, anti-family, anti-tradition and
anti-religious trend currently making its way through the West.
Spain,
however, is not the only Western country to take seriously the movement to
grant legal rights to beings other than humans. In fact, the push for legal
rights for non-humans took a step into new territory within the last several
months with the release of a report by the Swiss Ethics Committee on Non Human
Gene Technology (ECNH). The ECNH, which had previously released reports on
primates and animals, broke new ground by exploring the "dignity" of
plants.
ECNH's
study of plants stated, "The Committee members unanimously consider an
arbitrary harm caused to plants to be morally impermissible. This kind of
treatment would include, e.g. decapitation of wild flowers at the roadside
without rational reason." A majority of the committee also concluded that
plants, "are excluded for moral reasons from absolute ownership. By this
interpretation no one may handle plants entirely according to his/her own
desires."
While
traditional Judeo/Christian morality has always acknowledged that God's
creations, or nature, be always treated with respect, GAP, Peter Singer, and
the like are instead promoting a utilitarian philosophy that denies the
very distinction between plants, animals and humans, putting them on a
fundamentally equal footing.
As
bioethicist Wesley Smith explains on his blog in a post on the Spanish
resolution, "Of course the purpose of this isn't to merely improve the
treatment of great apes - which could be accomplished as it already has been in
some places via normal animal welfare statutes. Rather, the explicit point of
the GAP is revolutionary - to demote human beings from the uniquely valuable
species and into merely another animal in the forest.
"Once
people accept that premise," he continues, "Judeo/Christian
philosophy goes to the guillotine allowing the utilitarian agenda to proceed
unhindered, leading in turn to the moral value of the weak and vulnerable among
us becoming archaic, resulting in their loss of the right to life and being
used instrumentally for those deemed more valuable. (Lest you think we
exaggerate, check out Peter Singer's writings, and who can deny that his values
are triumphing?)"
Smith
concludes, "In the world being born out of the ashes of the
sanctity/equality of human life ethic, value will be subjective and rights
temporary - depending on one's individual capacities rather than humanity. And
we will see apes - animals (and eventually other animals), which are completely
oblivious about the hue and cry being mounted against human worth in their
names - being viewed as more important than some humans."