For those of you who still don’t believe the legal field is being taken over by wacko woke extremists, I submit the following: one new -- and rapidly growing-- legal field aims to establish rights for … inanimate objects.

According to thecollegefix.com, “one of the law schools leading the charge for this novel legal theory is New York University School of Law, which in 2022 launched the More Than Human Life Project, or MOTH, an initiative of the law school’s Earth Rights Research and Action Clinic.”

Alrighty, then.

But it is not just NYU Law leading this charge. Oh, no. Per The Fix, “Harvard University will offer a course this fall titled ‘Rights of Nature’ that ‘will examine this fast-growing field, assessing the origins, practice, and potential of granting legal personhood to natural objects.’”

Grant legal personhood to objects? How about we grant legal personhood to young persons in the womb first?! Might not an unborn child deserve “personhood” more than, say, a rock or a log? If we answer that question with a “no,” what does that say about us, and our future?

The flipside of rights is responsibilities. What responsibility does a rock or log have? If you think about it, if everything has rights, nothing has “rights.” 

What is really happening here is an attempt to replace our God-given natural rights with the pseudo-rights of nature. Stunning. It is a blatant refutation of God’s will as revealed in Genesis (1:26).

But back to MOTH. César Rodriguez-Garavito, its founding director who chairs the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law, stated that MOTH was inspired by a 2021 decision by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador that found that mining operations in the Los Cedros forest had violated the rights of Pachamama, a.k.a. “mother nature.” (Thank God the world’s courts didn’t arrive at dumb-ass findings like that before humans discovered fire, engaged in agriculture, built cities, extracted oil and gas, and invented heating and air-conditioning.)

Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez-Garavito has previously connected the election of President Donald Trump to a “proliferation of populist governments and movements [that] creates serious risks and challenges for human rights around the world.” A populist is a person who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. Populism is not a “serious risk and challenge” to “human rights around the world,” it is a vehicle for achieving them in the face of elitist power … and woke insanity.

But insanity is the new sanity, apparently. Know what’s a bigger challenge for human rights? Conferring “rights” on non-living entities like rocks, moss, and hills.

Image: CarlosA. Barrio, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed