New York – Animals Have More Rights In America Than Humans, Similar To Nazi Philosphy

New York – When General Electric Co. subsidiary GE Healthcare recently unveiled its plan to use human embryonic stem cells in its drug trials, the company proudly touted one of the plan’s potential benefits: Using stem cells derived from the destruction of human embryos may make the experiments on rats unnecessary.

“This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials,” Konstantin Fiedler of GE Healthcare told a reporter, according to Reuters news agency. “Once you have human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right now your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments on those cells.”

Well, that’s a relief. Researchers may need to kill a few million embryonic human beings for the sake of scientific progress, but at least they will not continue perpetuating a true atrocity — like the mass murder of mice. PETA must be proud.

Animal-rights activists also must be pleased by President Barack Obama’s recent nomination of law professor Cass Sunstein to serve in the key administrative role of “regulatory czar.” Sunstein has argued for banning recreational hunting and giving animals legal standing to sue humans. In a 2007 speech in which he critiqued everything from factory farming and greyhound racing to the mere act of eating meat, Sunstein speculated that someday “our willingness to subject animals to unjustified suffering” will be seen “as a form of unconscionable barbarity, not the same as, but in many ways morally akin to, slavery and mass extermination of human beings.”

That day already may have come. In America, the reasonable aims of the animal-welfare establishment, which traditionally has upheld crucial distinctions between humans and animals, increasingly are being supplanted by the irrational demands of animal-rights activists who recognize no such distinctions.

One such activist is Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued that the lives of chimpanzees deserve more protection than those of severely disabled newborns and the demented. An apologist for infanticide and euthanasia, Singer’s newest cause is health care rationing — and his ideas are getting mainstream attention. In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Singer said that using a mathematical formula to determine the value of a given human life — a formula that would score the value of the lives of quadriplegics and the elderly lower than those of able-bodied teenagers — makes more sense than basing health care decisions on “feel-good claims” about “the infinite value of every human life” that Singer considers bogus.

Singer’s penchant for pairing animal-rights advocacy with disrespect for human rights is not uncommon. Nor is it historically unprecedented.

When they came to power, the Nazis passed sweeping animal-protection measures that prohibited vivisection and kosher butchering and prescribed everything from the most painless way to cook a lobster to the most humane way to shoe a horse. Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the Nazi extermination camps, denounced hunting as “pure murder” of the “innocent.” Nazi commander Hermann Goring threatened to send to concentration camps those who “continue to treat animals as inanimate property.”

Blurring the moral distinction between animals and people did not make the Nazis more compassionate to people. Instead, it contributed to some of the greatest human-rights violations the world had ever seen, culminating in the slaughter of six million Jews, whom the Nazis treated worse than animals.

It’s easy to dismiss Nazi ideology as irrelevant to today’s debates about bioethics and health care, just as it’s easy to dismiss the human-animal equivalency theories embraced by Peter Singer and PETA as unworthy of serious concern. But if history teaches us anything, it is that ideas have consequences. And the seemingly harmless idea that animals and people possess equal moral standing is anything but.