timeimmortal

…but creating one in real life, especially a half-human, half-animal hybrid, is not morally sound, nor does it seem all that defensible on scientific grounds. Yes, I will grant that it is possible that some great new advance in medicine might come about because of experimentation on hybrid embryos, but so what? Imperial Japan made some great leaps in the field of medical research back in the 1940s, but their methods included grotesque experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The desired ends do not justify the means by which they are achieved.

David Warren, in fine form as always, puts the proper perspective on the issue:

The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown — the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one — is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

…Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures — Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality — has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.

We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

Evil ultimately only begets evil; that is why the Church constantly cautions against using evil means that good ends may come from it. Though the campaigners for abortion “rights” were doubtless driven by what was, in at least some of their minds, a desire to do “good” — in providing something that was, in their view, of benefit to women, and a tool of emancipation moreover — the ends they have achieved have far surpassed any gains that might have emerged.

Equality and suffrage for women good ends that have emerged from feminism, but these ends could have been achieved without abortion, and might even have been sweeter victories had history played out in that way. As it is, though, what gains feminism has made in terms of expanding the rights and role of women in society have been more or less counteracted — if not erased entirely — by the fact that our society, more than any other, objectifies women in ways that would have been unimaginable to our “patriarchal” forebears. It’s a common charge that the women of old were valued only for their ability to make babies. Even assuming that’s an accurate statement, it seems that in the modern day women are valued for even less than that — indeed, the ability of women to become pregnant is seen by many as something which needs to be corrected for. Our modern society regards women, essentially, as a means of consequence-free gratification.

And it should come as no surprise, then, that our modern, enlightened, post-Christian society thus regards human life in general as something expendable, and as something which can be tampered with willy-nilly at its earliest stages in pursuit of murky, uncertain, and rather unlikely scientific ends. Experimenting on embryos is, to be sure, different than experimenting on Chinese prisoners, but only in the sense that the embryos are at an earlier stage of development. The same disregard for certain categories of human life is still present. And creating human-animal hybrids does not remove that particular moral dilemma; it adds to it.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

So apparently the Senate, already being expert in the field of national governance, have expanded their knowledge base to include cutting-edge theology. Or perhaps “bleeding heart Theology” — I can’t really tell anymore.

My respect for Senator Anne Cools has gone up a few more notches, however. Though a member of the unelected portion of the Canadian government, she displays a level-headedness and clarity of principle that the and NDP seem completely devoid of, that the Bloc Quebecois sometimes displays but limits in focus to Quebec, and that the Conservative Party could display if they ever stopped trying to placate both the Liberal government and the liberal media.

I wonder exactly where the fundamental understanding of Jesus and His message goes wrong with Senator Marilyn Trenholme Counsell. On the surface, it seems she thinks of our Lord as some sort of hip swinger, someone who’d permit anything in the name of being “fair”.

Not exactly the picture of Jesus painted in the Gospels, is it? Certainly, Jesus’s message was one of peace and understanding, and certainly He tore down many barriers between Jew and Gentile, man and woman, slave and master, invader and invaded. He preached that all were equal in God’s eyes, and never turned away those who sought him.

Okay, that part sounds kind of like the picture our Senator paints. But is that the whole picture of Jesus?

As I recall it, if people came to Jesus as sinners, one of the first things He would do is ask them to repent and sin no more. If people came to Jesus who were sinners but did not realize it, or thought their actions permissible/moral/justified, He would correct them, often in a very direct and sometimes harsh way. He was especially harsh with the self-righteous authorities, those convinced of the correctness of their ways because of their status in society (not unlike, I would wager, a certain Senator I could name).

When he stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman, He did not condone her sin. He stood up not in support of her right to fornicate herself silly — instead, He stood up against the hypocrisy of those would would overlook their own sin in their zeal to condemn her, since all sins are equal in magnitude before God. And when her would-be executioners had left, He turned to her and (much more gently, but firmly nonetheless) told her to end her sinful practice.

When Jesus met the woman at the well in Galilee, He treated her as an equal, a valued child of God and a person. He did not condone her five (or was it six? Curse my memory…) marriages, nor the fact that she was shacking up with someone she was not married to (note: tacit condemnation of common-law relationships, people!). In fact, He pointed these things out to her as an example of her sin, and His frankness with her inspired her to repent.

Would Jesus support gay-marriage legislation? I think anyone who claims to speak for Jesus, as our Senator has done, is guilty of blasphemy, and so I won’t come out with a “yes” or “no” answer. But I will leave this parting thought:

Christian moral philosophy teaches that proper sexual relations have two seperate but indivisible parts: unification and procreation. If a couple engages in sexual union that is open to one but blocks the other, this is a sin, because it violates the natural order and God’s intention for humanity. Proper sexual relationships should be a joining, strengthening force in the lives of the couple, but the couple should always be open to the possibility of bringing forth a child. (And no, this isn’t the Monty Python conflation that “every time they have sex, they have to have a baby”.)

Bearing that in mind, and assuming for just a moment that the Church has got something right in its understanding after 2000 years of ministry, one has to ask whether a homosexual union qualifies. Certainly, I will be the first to concede that homosexual sexual relations, like heterosexual relations, can be unitive in nature. I admit that’s speculation on my part, having never had a homosexual affair myself, but I would wager it likely. But even in that case, that’s only part of the puzzle, isn’t it? And we could start the debate over artificial insemination and surrogacy, but let’s cut to the chase on that one: procreation, in its natural state, involves one zygote from each partner in the sexual union, so that the child will be biologically related to both of the people it will come to know as “parents”. Wake me when that’s possible in a non-heterosexual setting.

And really, given that same-sex marriage is already a morally contentious issue, do we really need to open the “embryos debate” can of worms too?

Do I support “equal rights” for homosexuals? That depends on what you mean. As I understand it, they are human too, and as such already have equal rights under the law in Canada, even before the various related Supreme Court filings. Should they not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality? My first answer is yes. But I think even there I need to disclaim. I think respect is a two-way street, and I think that homosexual lobbyists should not force their agenda on those whose personal beliefs hold the homosexual lifestyle as immoral. That means no bullying town mayors who don’t want to take part in “Pride” days. That means accepting that religions institutions may not condone promotion of that lifestyle in their classes. That even means accepting that some churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples will refuse to perform marriages for homosexual couples…not because they are discriminatory, but because for them the morality of the issue is anything but settled. And in return, I say that yes, homosexuals should not be targets of hate crimes, should not be denied employment (see caveat above), and should continue to enjoy the same full legal protection of the that they have since its institution in 1982.

But, as Anne Cools noted in the Senate debate: “Marriage is not now and has never been a right…No sacrament of the church has ever been a right.”