Hybrid human-animal embryos and selective morality
As I’ve said before, I struggle to understand the moral calculations required to allow one to take up and flourish in high politics. That’s why I blog in my pants and not get wined and dined by Global Mega Corp executives. Therefore, the current brouhaha over hybrid human-animal embryos, has me a bit stumped:
The government faces a rebellion over embryo laws unless Gordon Brown allows a free vote, a Labour MP has warned.
The Catholics aren’t happy about the creation of the embryos for some reason I can’t fathom amongst the histrionic, demagogic language. Cardinal Keith O’Brien has described the science as ‘monstrous’ and ‘experiments of Frankenstein proportion‘.
Of the ‘2.2 million human embryos already destroyed or experimented upon’, the Cardinal offers no suggestion of who should carry these laboratory-created clusters of cells to term or clothe them and feed them. He’s certainly not offering. He’s the ideas man, you see - he wants you to stop doing that and do this. How that happens is for less spiritual minds.
The fact we’re not going to see half-human half-squirrel monkey people on our streets is completely by the by (and a great shame, if you ask me) but it’s a useful image to conjure in the minds of a public who rarely look beyond headlines.
The fact that the science of hybrid human-animal embryos, if successful, could mean the end to suffering for thousands if not millions seems to have passed many people by. Lost, as they are, in febrile daydreams of Tonto the Elephant Boy lumbering through the land or all those tiny little bags of chemical chance winging their way to heaven, the application and potential benefits don’t get a look in.
It’s certainly a consideration missing from man of God Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s sermon. Jesus went around curing the sick. Under this management? Live with it.
Look at some of the Catholic MPs and cabinet ministers getting in a lather about the little itty-bitty potential-babies. Des Browne: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Ruth Kelly: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Paul Murphy: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Geraldine Smith: voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
Paul Goggins: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Tommy McAvoy: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Frank Roy: voted very strongly for the Iraq war. Tony Cunningham: voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
These people want to be allowed to vote with their consciences. Where were their consciences on March 18 2003 when the vote was taken to kill real, walking, talking, breathing, laughing human beings? How does an imaginary half-woman half-penguin get more rights than Iraqi children? Would the scientists get more support if their declared their intentions to cluster bomb these embryos?
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 at 8:35 am
| See also • God’s will: picking and choosing • A few little things to get through quickly • Uranium rights vs human rights |
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the Cardinal offers no suggestion of who should carry these laboratory-created clusters of cells to term or clothe them and feed them. He’s certainly not offering.
The Catholic Church looking after children? That’s like having an alcoholic as a Threshers store manager.
The fact (is) we’re not going to see half-human half-squirrel monkey people on our streets
I’ve just got back from Aberdeen city centre and I think you’re wrong.
Photo evidence please! I’ll pay!
And of course half a million children had already died in Iraq before 2003 from the effects of the murderous blockade which Ms Albright thought was’ a price worth paying’. I don’t remember many of these MPs disagreeing with her analysis.
Yes indeed, I just saw the Cardiff Arch thingy without a hint of irony talk about votes of conscience. It seems like (as has emerged in America) they ‘care’ about embyo’s right up until birth, then fuck ‘em (insert catholic priest joke here) particularly if they have signed up to a competing god gang.
The relation to Browne reminds me of reading about a US Marine who was digusted with the company chaplain who said that killing sanctioned by your government was ok (not that the marine was against the killing he just didn’t like the hypocrisy around something he knew was awful but chose to do anyway, he expected better from a religious man). I rather hope Browne is really devout and is slowly unraveling as he realises he is going to eternal damnation.
Yes, but what we really want to know is what Nadine Dorries thinks:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2oo6sr
I bet someone had to tell her what ‘cui bono’ means for starters.
And this:
Cardinal O’Brien has not always been my favourite Cardinal
She has a favourite cardinal? Who is it if it’s not counter-Enlightenment champion Cardinal O’Brien?
All we need is a little persuasion. What if these conscientious objectors were made to believe that all these potential badger-human hybrid embryos had somehow magically acquired the means to deliver untold death and destruction to us all in, oh, I don’t know, 15 minutes?
It’d be open season.
There’s a George Carlin sketch that sums this up precisely. I googled to check it and notice you got there three years before me.
http://www.chickyog.net/2005/01/25/suffer-the-little-children/
I like George:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrXvDXVhqfU
How does an imaginary half-woman half-penguin get more rights than Iraqi children?
Because she’s Transport Secretary and they’re not?
[...] The kiddie fiddling Catholic Church in Scotland has had its bishopic tights in a knot this week over government proposals to allow the creation of socalled human-animal embryo hybrids, demanding Catholic Labour MPs vote against it. And indeed a great many of those now feel moral qualms they’ve never encountered before. Says Chicken Yoghurt: [...]