Who gets rights in fantasy land?

We’ve already seen the Apes get them in Spain.

Now…hold on….you won’t believe this.

Ecuador just gave every virus, bacterium, insect, tree & weed constitutional rights.

Rights language has already been hijacked from the original intent of the Consitution and Declaration of Independence, as Wesley points out here.

But now it’s run amok.

This doctrine of human exceptionalism has been under assault in recent decades from many quarters. For example, many bioethicists assert 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, claiming that we and animals are moral equals based on our common capacity to feel pain, a concept known as “painience.”

These radical agendas have now been overtaken by an extreme environmentalism that seeks to–and this is not a parody–grant equal rights to nature. Yes, nature; literally and explicitly. “Nature rights” have just been embodied as the highest law of the land in Ecuador’s newly ratified constitution pushed by the country’s hard-leftist president, Rafael Correa, an acolyte of Hugo Chávez.

Take notice:

The new Ecuadorian constitution reads:

“Persons and people have the fundamental rights guaranteed in this Constitution and in the international human rights instruments. Nature is subject to those rights given by this Constitution and Law.”

That, right there, is a radical statement.

What does this co-equal legal status between humans and nature mean? Article 1 states:

“Nature or Pachamama [the Goddess Earth], where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

Wesley states the obvious:

This goes way beyond establishing strict environmental protections as a human duty. It is a self-demotion of humankind to merely one among the billions of life forms on earth–no more worthy of protection than any other aspect of the natural world.

As outrageous as this is, you may think it’s just ‘over there’, in some other part of the world where radicals are in control. But your thinking is largely formed by what you learn through the media. And…

The mainstream media have made no attempt to sound the alarm about the dangers of this agenda. A New York Times environmental blogger was bemused by the Ecuadorian constitution, and an editorial in the Los Angeles Times found Ecuador’s proposal to make nature the moral equal of people “intriguing.”

And this dangerous trend to turn human rights inside out is spreading across the globe. Look at the rundown in his article. Spain, Austria, Switzerland….and new stirrings toward this radical agenda out of South Africa, Italy, Australia and Nepal. For now.

At a time when Pope Benedict calls repeatedly and eloquently for a “new humanism”, we have to worry about the spread of the new anti-humanism.