The piece argues that a growing left-wing trend treats unborn children as nonpersons while extending legal personhood to rivers, parks, and even wild rice, and it links this shift to ideology, control, and practical consequences.
The Left’s attitude toward human life shows up in strange and troubling ways, from self-hating elites to apocalyptic environmentalists. Those cultural currents feed into a political view that denies unborn children the status most people would call human. That denial sits at the center of a broader pattern where personhood gets stretched to include animals, plants, and places.
Affluent white female urban Leftists, labeled AWFULs in some circles, are just one visible cohort where cultural self-loathing is common. That same mindset, when institutionalized, supports policies that treat human life as conditional and negotiable. Abortion sits at the intersection of those beliefs, revealing a deep philosophical contempt for individual human beings before birth.
At the same time, the Left often pushes to give legal recognition to nature, even when it rejects personhood for the unborn. In Minnesota, Democrats are pushing to grant personhood to wild rice.
That contrast is hard to square: a movement that will assign rights to a plant yet denies basic protections to an embryo. The language used is telling — euphemisms like “reproductive freedom” and “choice” paper over a very stark moral choice about who counts as a rights-bearing human. Once you accept that people can be excluded from basic moral consideration, expanding personhood to non-humans becomes a perverse mirror image of the same impulse.
It gets weirder when you look at how these ideas play out in law and policy. So “Minnesota nice” means rice has legal protections that unborn children do not.
Science says life begins at conception, but the so-called “Party of Science” ignores that, too. That selective science is a political tool, not an honest attempt to follow evidence wherever it leads. When ideology picks winners for what counts as life, the law follows, and that creates real-world consequences beyond abstract debates.
Power and control are part of the motive, not just principle. In Wisconsin, legislators have floated giving personhood to Devil’s Lake State Park, a move that would let anyone sue on behalf of the park and expand environmental standing in unpredictable ways. That idea moves the goalposts from conserving public land to empowering third parties to block ordinary activities under the banner of defending nature.
That proposal, of course, doesn’t say what “violates” the “rights” of Devil’s Lake meaning anyone can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the park, for almost any reason. It also means that the park — and nature’s — “right to exist” becomes a “right” to not have natural resources used at all. Courts and juries would be asked to resolve philosophical disputes the public never voted on, and ordinary people would face legal exposure for routine behavior.
Think through the logic: if wild rice is a person, harvesting it could be framed as violating that personhood. That starts with a single crop and could logically spread to livestock and staple crops. The extension from rice to cows, pigs, corn, and potatoes is not a fantasy if personhood becomes a tool for ideological goals.
Once personhood is untethered from human beings and used as a weapon in culture wars, the results are predictable: more litigation, fewer economic options, and legal standing for parties with agendas that run counter to everyday American life. The practical effect is to hand veto power over families, farmers, and outdoor recreation to activists and trial lawyers. That is not governance; it is a transfer of power away from accountable institutions.
For conservatives, the policy implications are clear: laws should protect human life consistently and avoid creating legal structures that let non-humans be litigated like people. The contrast between granting rights to wild rice and denying them to unborn children exposes a moral and legal incoherence that people on both sides should find alarming. Preserving human dignity means resisting both ideological overreach and the legal games that follow from it.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
