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Ape Discrimination?

Spain's parliament is poised to pass a bill granting great apes -- chimps, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos -- human rights.

Oh, don't worry, they are starting small, offering just four of the 50 rights that human Europeans enjoy.

Spain's proposed rewriting of our own Declaration of Independence reads something like this: All apes are endowed by parliament with certain inalienable rights, among them life, personal safety, limited freedom of movement and the right to claim property through court-appointed (human) guardians.

Not exactly Jeffersonian, but a revolution in human thinking nonetheless.

The poster boy, er, ape, for this great new cause is an animal dubbed "Matthew" by humans (I don't know what, if anything, he calls himself), whose future has been rendered uncertain because the Vienna animal shelter that cared for him is going bankrupt. There are easier ways to make sure Matthew lives in ape heaven for the rest of his natural life, but no matter. This isn't about protection for one ape; it's about a giant new step for mankind, putting Spain at the moral forefront as the first country to recognize that apes are, well, people too.

One of the questions lurking in the back of my mind is: What next?

What's the next great civil rights movement? I know there will be one, but what?

Culture is made, it doesn't just happen and as James Davison Hunter has pointed out so often, it is essentially a top-down enterprise. Culture has a center -- the people who make it -- and a periphery -- the rest of us who begin by looking on in amazement, snickering and eventually (the progressives are betting) adapting to the new reality imposed on us by our betters.

By now the basic outline of the strategy for cultural power is clear: Begin with one of the world's truly great moral and spiritual narratives -- the civil rights movement -- but take black people out of the heart of this narrative, and insert the new victim d'jour.

Divert the spiritual and moral power of the movement -- for which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died -- to strange new purposes.

Use human sympathy for real victims to disguise the underlying drive for power: to use the law to impose your values on the rest of society. Redefine the word "tolerance" so it means: Agree with me or be denounced and driven from the public square.

Man, that's power.

For what purpose will it be used next?

This week, the American Medical Association apologized for past racial discrimination because, in the words of the AMA's immediate-past president, Dr. Ronald M. Davis, in the July 16 Journal of the American Medical Association: "The medical profession, which is based on a boundless respect for human life, had an obligation to lead society away from disrespect of so many lives."

Reading those words, suddenly I had a dream: Could the next great civil rights movement be to protect the million not-yet-born children each year who are literally never permitted to see the light of day? Could the culturemakers who need to see themselves as participating in this great moral drama that gives meaning to their lives, come to recognize the incongruity of entertaining the idea that apes may have a right to life on the grounds they share "98.5 percent of DNA" while withholding it from real, living, developing human children?

Could the good doctors at the AMA, in other words, imagine apologizing, not just for disrespecting human life, but for actually participating in snuffing out human life -- getting paid for it -- making a profession of it?

That guy Jefferson wrote a lot of great stuff, including this: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

But in places like Spain, I suspect, they are so over worrying about that.

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Related Topics: civil rights | declaration of independence | ethics | jefferson |

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