title: JUDGE GIVES ‘LEGAL PERSONHOOD’ TO MONKEYS: SHOULD MONKEYS HAVE THE SAME LEGAL RIGHTS AS PEOPLE?
text: Habeas Corpus for Animals???The  animal personhood  movement believes dolphins, great apes, and elephants deserve to be able to sue   and now it has a plaintiff.A New York judge has ordered the state to justify why two chimpanzees allegedly kept at a Long Island public university and used as research subjects shouldn t be transferred to an animal sanctuary in south Florida.The animal rights advocates representing the animals hailed the judge s decision late Monday to grant a hearing early next month as a watershed moment for their long and controversial effort to persuade courts to confer human rights on primates.It wasn t as big a victory for animal rights fanatics as initially thought:The judge, according to [a spokesman for the state court system], mistakenly labeled her order a writ of habeas corpus, saying she had only granted the hearing to discuss the legal issues raised by the Nonhuman Rights Project. Judge [Barbara] Jaffe on Tuesday amended her initial order, striking out the words  habeas corpus  from the document.That s how progressivism works. They push the envelope as far as they can. If people scream with laughter or in horror, they pull it back a little. Then, after the barrage of liberal propaganda we are relentlessly assailed with from every direction has had a little more time to work on us, they push the envelope forward again.For their part the animal rights kooks are not backing down:The organization isn t challenging the conditions of their confinement, but the confinement itself. In a petition last month, the group described the animals as  autonomous and self-determining beings  who should be  protected by the common law of habeas corpus,  a right granted only to  legal persons. Give Obama a few more years to stack the courts with left-wing zealots. Not only will monkeys, dogs, and goldfish have habeas corpus rights, they will be entitled to vote and collect welfare   or rather, their  human companions  will be entitled to on their behalf.Why not? According to liberal ideology, souls do not exist, and there is no moral difference between a human and an animal.