‘Catholic’ College Profs Demand Abortion, but Advocate Dolphin ‘Personhood’
Dolphins deserve “personhood” and human babies deserve
subsidized killing. At many institutes of “higher learning,” such a position would
hardly raise eyebrows. But at an ostensibly Catholic university?
Around 80 college faculty and staff members at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) lent their signatures to a demand in the in the student newspaper that the university continue abortion coverage via its healthcare plan, according to the Cardinal Newman Society. Administrators last month stated that employee health coverage no longer included abortions.
LMU, a self-described “premier Catholic university rooted in the Jesuit and Marymount traditions” since 1911, boasts more than 9,000 students at a Los Angeles campus.
Among the more than 150 total signatures on the demand is that of Professor Tom White, who has called for dolphins to be recognized as “persons.”
As the Conrad H. Hilton Professor of Business Ethics, White insisted in an LMU press release that dolphins are “nonhuman persons” who deserve “moral standing” as individuals. He argued, “they have the kind of consciousness that, in the past, we thought was unique to our species. They’re not just aware of the world around them, but they have the ability to look inside and say ‘I.’” So, eventually, do human babies.
In an effort to obtain special protection for the species, White spoke with BBC News last year on a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans,” and explained, "A person [aka dolphin] needs to be an individual. If individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individuals of this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being.” What if you just kill them in the womb?
White previously studied extensively on the topic, authoring a book entitled, “In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier” which argued that “the current relationship between humans and dolphins is, in effect, equivalent to the relationship between whites and Black slaves two centuries ago.”
But then, liberals share a unique adoration for animals (and that’s putting it nicely). At the top of the animal lovers list, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), once asked Virginia to sponsor a “Fishing Hurts” road stop – and later went so far as to plan a porn website for the sake of threatened animals.
The media only encourage the behavior, from the AP praising extremist animal rights “activists” who set equipment on fire at a beef processor to the New York Times asking an infanticide advocate to speak on a dog predicament.
Surprisingly, White holds the answer to his and the media’s problems when discussing his book’s epilogue:
Humans do not treat members of our own species terribly well, so I have no illusions that humans are suddenly going to treat members of another species appropriately. Perhaps in a couple hundred years, our species will do better in how we treat one another, and we may also make some small progress in how we treat members of other intelligent species. In the meantime, the problem that all of us need to reflect on is how to help our species get to that point—that is, how to behave in a way that truly “intelligent” beings would.
Perhaps not murdering millions of infants would be a good start.
As for the ‘premier Catholic university” that employs White, it must be happy that its diversity programs are so successful. Not every college can say its professor of business ethics has a sever moral disability.
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter.
