by Sassafras

Created on: May 30, 2008

Moral hypocrisy has always been part and parcel of being an American. Even at the time our country was founded, the relatively liberal founding fathers who declared their independence from King George and created the Constitution "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," pointedly excluded women, Indianscalled "merciless savages" in the Declaration of Independenceand the black African slaves who helped make them prosperous.

The standard dictionary definition of liberal includes: tolerance and freedom from bigotry, receptive to reform and new ideas, and broad-minded. But today, although human slavery is a thing of the past, women and blacks can now vote, and Indians are called Native Americans, not savages, there remains a sector of our society that still gets little respect from liberals, who should know better: nonhuman animals. Animals are our modern oppressed class, our 21st century slaves.

It may sound bizarre to some, but legal personhood for animals is not as radical as it sounds. An ongoing European court case involves a chimpanzee named Hiasl, intended for a vivisection lab, abducted from Sierra Leone as a baby in 1982 and smuggled into Austria. Customs officers seized his crate because his papers were not in order, and he ended up living at an animal sanctuary for a number of years. The sanctuary had financial problems and Hiasl was again threatened with being sent to a lab or zoo. His only hope was that a legal guardian be appointed to manage the money he received from an Austrian businessman to save him from that terrible fate as well as allowing him the right to sue the lab that tried to import him in the first place. Eminent animal advocates such as primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall and attorney Stephen Wise support Hiasl's case. But an Austrian judge has refused the request for a legal guardian because she fears that it would equate humans who have legal guardians with animals. (Interestingly, blacks and Indians, like animals, were once considered inferior to humans and therefore not deserving of legal rights either.) Even though the battle may have been lost, the war for legal personhood for Hiasl and other great apes, our closest relatives, will continue.

Sadly, liberals care very much about human rights but often mock the idea of giving animals rights because they're convinced their

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>