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NY Judge cites Sup Ct Same-Sex Marriage ruling in Chimp freedom case

NY Judge cites Sup Ct Same-Sex Marriage ruling in Chimp freedom case

There are slippery slopes, and then there’s this future slippery slope

https://www.facebook.com/NonhumanRights/photos/pb.115347381843460.-2207520000.1417797118./860753710636153/?type=3&theater

A New York State Judge recently denied an attempt by a group acting for Tommy the Chimp to obtain habeas corpus relief. (Full embed at bottom of post.)

But in so denying relief, the judge predicted possible future change citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the same-sex marriage case. #Seriously.

Now we have covered the slippery slope as much as anyone in the area of polygamy and polyamorous clusters, including in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage:

But there’s the slippery slope, and then there’s this slippery slope as reported by Slate:

https://twitter.com/Slate/status/627600511492063232

Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as the tweet makes it sound, depending on what the definition of “bad” is:

On Wednesday, New York Supreme Court Judge Barbara Jaffe rejected a claim that two chimpanzees in a New York research laboratory have a right to bodily liberty. The Nonhuman Rights Project had filed a petition for the two chimps, Hercules and Leo, for a writ of habeas corpus freeing them from unlawful imprisonment. In denying the petition, Jaffe could have laughed off the NRP’s claims. Instead, she wrote a surprisingly thoughtful opinion that gives both liberty and morality a fair shake.

To its credit, the NRP has not argued that chimps and other great apes have a constitutional right to habeas corpus

….

Jaffe takes this claim seriously despite its novelty. No offense intended, I assume, but she does so by repeatedly citing the Supreme Court’s decisions broadening the rights of liberty for gay Americans. “If rights were defined by who exercised them in the past,” she notes, quoting Obergefell v. Hodges, “then received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied….

Still, Jaffe writes, questions about chimps’ right to autonomy should be answered by a higher court or the legislature—not a supreme court judge. (In New York, supreme courts are low-level trial courts.) While quoting another gay rights ruling,Lawrence v. Texas’ admonishment that “times can blind us to certain truths,” Jaffe throws out the petition for Hercules and Leo’s release. “Efforts to extend legal rights to chimpanzees are understandable,” she writes. “Someday they may even succeed.””

Surely Slate jests?

No, the citation to the Supreme Court same-sex marriage case is in there, not to justify the ruling, but to point out that the chimps should keep hope alive of some future form of “personhood”:

Chimpanzee Freedom Case - Conclusion 1
Chimpanzee Freedom Case - Conclusion 2

(Don’t blame me, I didn’t make this up.)

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Chimpanzee Freedom Case – Opinion July 30 2015

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Comments

Yeah well..

Judgie probably can’t park a ‘smart car’, either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps7QQ170S2U

Do people really want to do this to Obama?

Efforts to extend legal rights to chimpanzees are thus understandable, some day they may even succeed.

Naturally, chimpanzees will have a right to same sex marriage, and females a right to an abortion.

And a bakery can’t deny a wedding cake for a gay chimp wedding.

Henry Hawkins | August 1, 2015 at 10:49 pm

If anyone is interested, I’m now interviewing for a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th wife. No experience necessary. Good bennies.

Makes sense to me. The judge is saying that if the Supreme Court can read a right to same-sex marriage into the constitution, who’s to say what they’ll do next.

The slippery slope is not extending rights to animals, but rather selectively excluding animals, and people with diverse orientations and behaviors. The pro-choice cultish doctrine creates moral hazards by design, not chance. The poaching of [wholly innocent] human lives, and reselling their trophy parts and tissue, only marked the beginning of this “secular” cult’s depravity.

If John Roberts has the right to be Chief Justice, and John Boehner has the right to be House Squeaker, and Michelle Obama has the right to be first lady, and Al Sharpton has the right to be a close advisor to the president of the United States, and the loons that host MSNBC shows have the right to be on television, why should only those monkeys have rights and not others?

I for one welcome the day when our liberal superiors on the court proclaim that chimpanzees deserve human rights while denying human rights to our unborn children. Their rationale to justify why chimpanzees deserve more human rights than actual human life should be most amusing.

They are “fundamentally transforming” America.

See how deep this transformation is becoming:

Last night I woke up to drink water and found a roach casually cruising across the dining room floor towards the kitchen.
There was a moment of hesitation on my part. “She” was not afraid. I think “she” was convinced that she was entitled to be there. Then I stepped on “her” kinda casually too and went on to my business.

Now I am scared.
Did I commit murder?
Did I violate the poor animal’s civil and human rights?
I think I will dig “her” out of the trash can now.
I gotta hide the evidence ….
… the government could be watching me …
… Oh! My God!
I am going to jail!
What will happen to my family, my kids !!
What a horrible mistake!
I should have never stepped on that roach!
[ weep …]

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | August 2, 2015 at 10:54 am

It used to be that people got rich by providing a product or service that someone else voluntarily chose to buy. Then the rich person re-invested his earnings to expand his existing business or create new business ventures. The goal was to keep producing products and services that people voluntarily wanted. There was no coercion and it was win-win in that both the buyer and the seller negotiated a deal each could live with.

Increasingly, rich people are using their resources to fund “non-profits” to CHANGE society through government coercion. They are no longer content merely to produce products and services that other people voluntarily want to buy to improve their own condition. They are funding non-profits to use the courts and/or lobbying Congress to change the rules that 320 million of us are expected to live by – like pretending a chimp has the same right to liberty and due process as the actual people who work hard to pay the taxes to fund the judge’s salary.

It’s probably always been this way, but as we have gotten more and more affluent it seems like the number of niche interest groups have proliferated so that now there is an interest group for just about anything imaginable. And the interest groups are who the politicians and, increasingly, the judiciary respond to.

    MaggotAtBroadAndWall in reply to MaggotAtBroadAndWall. | August 2, 2015 at 11:35 am

    BTW, here’s a report issued by the Senate when Republicans were in the minority detailing how a cabal of environmental groups funded by left wing billionaires are controlling energy policy. It’s titled, “How a Club of Billionaires And Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and the EPA”. There’s a ton of great information in the report, but they did a terrible job of presenting the data so it is hard to read.

    http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/6ce8dd13-e4ab-4b31-9485-6d2b8a6f6b00/chainofenvironmentalcommand.pdf

    I’ve done a little bit of work on the finances of the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Sierra Club. The Sierra Club has an annual budget of almost $100 million. They don’t sell or produce anything of value that others voluntarily want to buy. It is a non-profit charity. Do you think the air and water will ever be clean enough when you’ve got a budget of $100 million a year to say the air and water are not clean?

    The World Wildlife Fund is even bigger. Almost $500 million.

Professor, it’s kind of hard to comment on an article where so much of the text is unreadable due to formatting; the last 3 paragraphs of the block quote are all cut off on the right hand side.

Too many words are lost because the text appears to be under the long column at the right side of the page.

I do love this site, but I wish you’d fix this problem, which has been around for a while but is particularly egregious in this article.

(I’m only complaining because I don’t want to miss a single word of your wisdom!) 😀

Marriage equality is to be considered equal with chimp rights? Perhaps the judge’s words are a Pavlovian response to Cecil’s media coverage.

Now that marriage has been debased into the lowest common denominator of marriage ‘equality’ the judge’s response seems perfectly in line with atheism, Epicurean philosophy and the wedding of the unnatural with the perverse…to make all the animals happy.

Henry Hawkins | August 2, 2015 at 7:46 pm

My son just asked his motorcycle to marry him. (I am NOT Branca’s father IRL).