Our friend Wesley J. Smith writes:

I have been warning and warning that a virulent anti-humanism is becoming rampant. A site on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (roughly akin to the BBC) Website–Planet Slayer–specifically, “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator” tells you to enter and “find out when you should die!”

I kid you not. Hit the start button and find out when you should become six feet under (I assume cremation is worse than burial for global warming). I answered the questions roughly, and found I should have died at age 7.4. The pig (me) blew up in a bloody mess. Realize that this is being sold to children and it is shameful and profoundly nihilistic. And it illustrates again how profoundly anti-human and pro death certain aspects of our culture are becoming.

As Andrew Bolt, a blogger for the Herald Sun noted:

What a lovely insight into the green philosophy. Children should die to save the planet. [My son] Scott, I calculated, should have died at age 4.2.

A little joke, you will say. A mere attention grabber in a good cause. Trouble is, though, that there really is an insanely anti-human bent to deep green preaching on global warming, and there really are believers who feel only too keenly the planet is doomed by our sin, and humans must vanish.

Take the influential Gaia preacher Professor James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Revenge Of Gaia, calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to “save” the planet from warming. Or hear the ABC’s Ockham’s Razor air a lecture by a former academic arguing we must “put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile.”

And see the lengths to which some true believers now go. There’s Toni Vernelli, from animal liberation group PETA, who aborted her baby because “it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.” There’s Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself because it “was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do” in a warming world.

In “The Silence of the Asparagus” I warned:

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland’s enshrining of “plant dignity” is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

And once we see “the planet” as personal, it is easier to see humans as the vermin good only for eradication. This is very, very dangerous. Is anybody paying attention?

One of the more annoying trumps played in discussions about politics, abortion, and voting is the “well, he gets all those pro-lifers to vote for him, but look at how little he’s done.” It’s annoying largely because it’s untrue. Most recently this line has been played by several members of the blog Vox Nova.

Christopher Blosser of the Catholics in the Public Square blog has a very helpful post in response with an exhaustive list of recent pro-life political measures. Here are a couple:

* Unborn Victims of Violence Act
* Born-Alive Infants Protection Act
* Partial Birth Abortion Ban
* Hyde/Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment
* The U.S. House turned back a “stealth attempt” by Democratic leadership to pass a “clone-and-kill” bill
* President Bush’s veto of legislation (S. 5) that would mandate federal funding of the type of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos, in addition to issuing an executive order to promote more federal funding for promising types of stem cell research that do not require harming human embryos.

Read the entire post here.

First it was DC’s voucher program under attack, now it’s New York’s charter schools. An opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal gives the details:

Charter schools are built on a simple idea. In exchange for less state funding and a mandate on performance, charters are exempt from many high-cost regulations that hamstring traditional public schools.

Tapestry Charter School in central Buffalo has accepted that bargain and has excelled. It has served lower- and middle-income students since it opened its doors in 2001. Today it has about 350 students and, like most charters, outperforms district public schools on state tests. With smaller class sizes, more individual attention, longer school days and a longer academic calendar, students at Tapestry receive nearly two years more of instruction by the time they enter high school than students in other schools.

Recently, Tapestry won approval to add high school grades, and this is where the trouble started. To accommodate these new grades as well as serve the other students, the school decided to build a new building. It expected to pay about $8.5 million.

But last autumn, as a sop to labor unions, Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith ordered charter schools to adhere to state “prevailing wage” requirements, which mandate paying union wages for construction projects and which typically add 30% or more to the cost of a project. In Tapestry’s case, it would add more than $1.5 million, putting the school’s building expansion plans on hold.

Since their inception, charter schools had been exempt from this state law which, like its federal counterpart, the Davis-Bacon Act, applies to most public-works projects. Last month, however, state trial judge Michael Lynch upheld the new mandate, erroneously applying labor law to charter schools beyond anything intended by the legislature or precedent. The case is on appeal and will likely be overturned, but that could take years.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy has just published a fascinating research brief, “Newspaper Reactions to California Marriage Cases.” How have Americans responded to the May 15 gay-marriage ruling?, it asks, turning to the editorial pages of the twenty largest U.S. newspapers as one major indicator. The results are striking: Of the twelve which published editorials on the matter, only four supported the ruling.

All this doesn’t mean that our journalists have suddenly had a mass moral conversion, but rather, in this case at least, that the media understands America and democracy better than the courts. Or better than the courts care to. The whole brief is well worth perusal, but following are some excerpts. In short, as Robert Miller has been arguing, marriage may best be defended by democracy—which is another way of saying, by the people.

The New York Post, in “Overreach on the Left Coast”: “The ruling was yet another unwise exercise in judicial activism: judges imposing their personal vision of a proper social order on an unwilling electorate.”

The Washington Post, in “Meddling in Gay Marriage”: Pre-1954 racial segregation was “a far cry from the California experience with the rights of same-sex couples. . . . [The judges] engaged in an unnecessary bout of judicial micromanagement by redefining marriage through a novel reading of the state constitution.”

The Wall Street Journal, in “Gay Marriage Returns”: “As with California’s Supreme Court, many of the berobed judiciary take it as their solemn duty to do the people’s thinking for them on the world’s most difficult and divisive social issues. So it was with Roe v. Wade, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared 50 state legislatures irrelevant. The aftermath has been more than 30 years of the abortion wars. California’s Supreme Court is not the law of the land, but its 4–3 ruling . . . explicitly told both the state’s voters and its elected legislatures to get lost.”

Former First Things assistant editor John Rose has spent the past year living in Spain while working for a think-tank there. He’s headed to Duke Divinity School in the fall, and his employer is looking for a replacement. Young readers of First Things might want to consider applying:

The Social Trends Institute is beginning a new STI Fellowship program this year. Applicants should be recent college graduates and native English speakers. They should also possess strong writing and organizational skills, and preferably speak some Spanish. Knowledge of website maintenance is a strong plus. Main responsibilities include: organization of experts meetings, book proposals and dissemination, preparing articles, website maintenance, new projects. A small team structure means a high level of responsibility and involvement in decisions.

This year’s fellowship will begin in September and last for one or two years. STI Fellows will be provided with a reasonable salary. Other benefits include the opportunity to live in Barcelona, Spain and work in a lively university environment. If you know a young person who fits this description, please encourage him or her to email a resume and cover letter to ksemler@iese.edu.

If you’re in New York today, you might want to attend the following public forum:

“What Did Pope Benedict Say to America?”

Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus (Editor in Chief, First Things)
Fr. John Farren, OP (Director of Advancement,
Dominican Province of St. Joseph)
Angelo Mater (Publisher and Editor, Godspy.com)

June 18 at 7:00 PM
St. Vincent Ferrer Church Hall

On June 18, join us for a public forum entitled “What Did Pope Benedict Say to America?” Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, Fr. John Farren, OP, and Angelo Matera will reflect on the Pope’s recent apostolic journey to our country, focusing particularly on his messages to American Catholics, American non-Catholics, and American culture. A question-and-answer session will conclude the evening. Call 212-744-2080 or visit www.csvf.org.