Kerby Anderson

One of the questions that seem to stump otherwise intelligent people is the question, “What is a woman?” Another apparently difficult question surfaced in California. That is the question, “What is a bumblebee?” A California court ruled that bumblebees are fish and can be protected by the California Endangered Species Act.

This is merely a linguistic trick to expand the government’s reach, but there is growing evidence that several of the many woke ideas being applied to humans are now being applied to animals.

You can find headlines about “Checking privilege in the animal kingdom” and suggest that “Squirrel privilege is real.” Even the New York Times reported a few years ago that “Even Hermit crabs have wealth inequality.”

Perhaps the best example came from the court case in New York. The Nonhuman Rights Project has been trying to establish “legal personhood” for “great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales.” They wanted to establish a precedent by declaring Happy the elephant at the Bronx Zoo a legal person. They were rebuffed in a 5-2 decision by the New York State Court of Appeals.

While we can agree with the decision, my colleagues and I wonder about the two justices that apparently wanted to declare that Happy the elephant is a person. An elephant is an elephant and not a person even if Happy might be more intelligent than some people.

An observation often attributed to G.K. Chesterton is, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing anything.” When our secular society rejects God and the belief that humans are created in the image of God, the logical next step has become woke animal rights.