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Great Moments in Wingnut Overreaction

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So a group of Swiss biologists and philosophers produce a report suggesting that humans perhaps shouldn’t arbitrarily destroy plants. While the report was commissioned by the Swiss government, and though it attempts to flesh out certain concepts — like “dignity” and “living beings” — that are relevant both to the Swiss constitution and to recent biotech legislation, the report itself is merely advisory.

If you’re a reasonably sane person living in the United States, news of this report might strike you as uncontroversial, or innocuous, or maybe even a bit confusing, given the fact that your own country has spent several years waging a grotesque and fraudulent war in Iraq that’s squandered hundreds of thousands of human lives. What a strange and exotic people, these Swiss, to devote public resources to noodling over the ethical treatment of plant life.

If you’re a wingnut, though — particularly one who happens to be affiliated with the Discovery Institute — you know better than to let this pass without time an embarrassing freak out. And so:

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland’s enshrining of “plant dignity” is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The remainder of the piece is worthy of Jonah Goldberg. That is, Swiss ethicists — posing genuinely interesting questions about the relationship between human and non-human organisms — are asked to explain why they aren’t revealing their true agenda, which would include mandatory abortion, euthanasia, organ-harvesting, sterilization, and forced human extinction. Of course, when you proceed from the conviction that biological science jumped the shark during the mid-19th century, subtlety is probably too much to ask.

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