You--unenlightened as you probably are--may think that human rights for non-humans is oxymoronic, or just plain moronic. But there is a growing academic movement to assign such rights in a rather promiscuous manner to lower animals, robots (if it walks like a human being and talks like a human being, it must be a human being, right?), as well as your favorite tree in the front yard. At the University of Washington some of the most strident defenders of Darwinism are also the most ardent "transhumanists", advocating the mixture of human beings and animals into new kinds of creatures. We are not talking about transplanted organs here, but hybrid creatures. If we can clone people someday soon, why not create hybrids of people and animals.
If you think I am pulling your foreleg, catch this web entry that decries People who Like People (in preference to cows or onions or satyrs or R2D2) as "human racists." Get it? You are now some kind of racist if you think people of all kinds are more worthy of special care than various non-humans.
Of course, the net product of such leveling inevitably is not so much to improve the treatment of animals (and robots), but to justify the denigration of "what it means to be human," as Pope John Paul II termed it.
It gives me satisfaction that the "transhumanists" are critical of our "human exceptionalist," Discovery Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith.
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