Judge Says Monkeys Have Human Rights, Babies Don’t

Planned Parenthood Judge says that monkeys can “feel and love”. Can babies?

Democrats scored a big win when they flipped the Michigan Supreme Court by electing Justice Elizabeth Welch. Dems had promoted Welch, a radical leftist activist, with the promise that she would “Put People First”: instead in her latest ruling, she decided to put monkeys first.

The case had been brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project which brings lawsuits on behalf of the “right to liberty of animals”, arguing that “common law courts must recognize our nonhuman animal clients as legal persons with the fundamental right to bodily liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus” requiring that they should be released from zoos. The Project argues that monkeys like “African Americans, and Native Americans used to be considered legal things”: which is probably the most racist thing that anyone not wearing a KKK hood has ever said.

The rest of the Michigan Supreme Court did not show any interest in granting habeas corpus to monkeys, except for Justice Elizabeth Welch who wrote that she would like to explore whether “chimpanzees possess a common law right to bodily liberty” and rejected the idea that “the Book of Genesis is a sound foundation for Michigan common law”. Justice Welch cited Peter Singer, the godfather of the animal rights movement, who had argued for killing children and the elderly, and had defended having sex with animals. According to Welch, “chimpanzees can think, feel, love, grieve, and yearn” and we should follow Peter Singer’s call to expand our circle of moral concern.

Can babies feel and love? Apparently not enough to keep from being murdered in the womb.

Welch’s campaign had been backed by Planned Parenthood and as part of the new majority, she took part in the court’s suppression of any legislation protecting the rights of unborn children. In an IVF case, the court also took the position that the right of a male divorced parent to prevent a child from being born trumped the right of the mother to allow the child to be born.

This is in keeping with Peter Singer’s view that a child may be killed even 28 days after birth.

As soon as Welch was seated, she began issuing a string of radical decisions that favored her party, including campaigning to remove President Trump from the Michigan ballot in the 2024 election because of the J6 riots, and restricting Republican poll watchers from catching fraud.

Justice Welch also argued that adult criminals should be treated like children, but actual children should be killed. When it came to adult murderers, Welch complained that their “automatic condemnation to die in prison at 18 was cruel” and forced judges to use female pronouns when talking about transgender men who falsely claim to be women. Calling for granting human rights to monkeys on behalf of an organization equating black people and monkeys while rejecting the Bible in favor of a man who defended sex with animals as the moral touchstone for Michigan may well be the pinnacle of her young judicial career.

But it also gets at the larger question of what rights are and who deserves them. A chimp has a right not to be in a zoo and a group of left-wing lawyers should be allowed to bring a habeas corpus case on behalf of monkeys who have no concept of what a lawyer is and even less concept of the law than Justice Elizabeth Welch, but let a pro-life group try to bring a habeas corpus case on behalf of an unborn child and Welch would boot it in a land speed law record.

(What her position would be in a pro-crime habeas corpus case of the kind that was filed on behalf of the unborn child of a pregnant woman in prison in Florida might be more interesting since it would bring into conflict the abortion imperative to deny personhood to unborn children with the pro-crime agenda of freeing criminals using any and every possible trick in the book.)

Justice Welch rejected the historic origins of rights as the work of “18th century British jurists”, but then where does her conception of rights actually come from and that of her movement?

The answer gets at the grave threat that leftist jurisprudence poses to actual civil rights.

When choosing between a baby and a chimp, Justice Welch is making political choices, not ones based on any legal tradition, but that derive from her ideological empathy. A chimp is worthy of empathy because granting it rights ‘expands the moral circle of concern’ and overturns the Bible while granting rights to an unborn child would take away the right to abortion and affirm the Bible. The rest is specious reasoning that is inserted in order to achieve that political end.

Leftist empathy is not that of some tender ‘bleeding heart’ (a conservative stereotype of the 80s) but the selective weaponization of emotion that chooses to care about some while choosing not to care about others. That means caring about chimps, not babies, and caring about men who want to play women’s sports, and not the women being victimized by them, it means crying over 18-year-old murderers while dismissing the suffering of their victims, and siding with Islamic terrorists over those whom they kill. The ‘circle of moral concern’ cited by Justice Welch is really a Bermuda Triangle representing an odd shape in which pity disappears as often as it appears.

The movement that Justice Welch is part of kills children while claiming that it’s fighting for civil rights, in the name of intersectionality, it progressively destroys the rights of every group that it once fought for and it terminates the rule of law and replaces it with ideological hysterics.

The more the Left claims to be fighting for civil rights, the worse life keeps getting for everyone.

Justice Welch was supposed to “put people first”: instead she put monkeys first, but the monkeys shouldn’t get too confident. First the Left adopts your cause, then it sells you out.

And then before too long, the monkeys will be asked to check their privilege.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.