Constitutional rights and dignity for PLANTS

For years I hosted a Christmas party for other area pastors and we'd each bring a white elephant book to exchange. We'd keep our eye open all year for the nuttiest Christian book (not hard to find actually) and wrap it up for the annual gift exchange. For example, one year I found and wrapped up an old out-of-print paperback called "The Power of Prayer on Plants." Lots of laughs that night.

Would you believe in Switzerland there is talk of Constitutional rights for plants? Parliament has assembled a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to discuss this and the conversation is littered with phrases like the "dignity" and "lifestyles of plants" and the "plant community."

Chuck Colson devoted a recent Breakpoint segment to this nuttiness. There is no debating which side of the ideological line crazy can be found on. Colson included this analysis;

As ethicist Wesley J. Smith has pointed out, phrases like “plant community” and the “dignity” of plants is evidence that our rejection of the biblical worldview “is driving us crazy.” Having rejected the “unique dignity and moral worth of human beings,” it was logical that “we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.”

More than that, this shift in worldview, Smith writes, regards “treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings” as “invidious discrimination.”

Unfortunately, the damage from this worldview isn’t limited to making Alpine countries look silly or creating more paperwork for researchers. While some of the sought-after parity between man and the rest of creation is achieved by raising the status of animals and plants, most of it comes through lowering our status as humans.

That’s where the real danger lies. Research that could help feed countless millions is made more difficult and even impossible because of concerns over plant “dignity.” Even worse, carrying the logic to its conclusion, the sanctity of human life becomes a matter of what you can do, not who you are—that is, someone created in the image of God.

Chalk it up to more of the same… it's the "save the planet even if it means killing the people" mentality. Thank you Algore. When will the environmentalists figure out humans are part of the environment?