Ecumenical Insanity

Saturday, June 19th

Solid thinking on ESCR

Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) is the latest Big Thing being bandied about by those whose "compassion" is deeper than their ethical understanding. A bracing retort to some of the soggier thinking going on in at least one mainline church (United Methodist) is offered in Christian Century by Duke Divinity School ethics professor Amy Laura Hall. Some excerpts:

A multimillion-dollar medical industry surrounds the supposedly simple "which of these two entities matters more?" approach. Endorsing ESCR means endorsing an elaborate, systematic, routine industry of embryo production and destruction, an industry not likely to limit itself to therapies for chronic disease. To suggest that we will not also see the emergence of more generally applicable, and more widely lucrative, products defies common sense....

Once early embryos become something less than incipient human life, once they are treated in vitro as a means toward the end of pregnancy, once they are cryopreserved in thousands of vats across the country, ESCR with "excess" embryos may be predictably the next step. Given that so many good Protestant couples have accepted the creation, cryopreservation and disposal of early embryos, it may be almost impossible for an argument against ESCR to gain traction.

It may also become increasingly difficult for any argument against any research on early embryos to command a hearing (including arguments against "therapeutic" cloning) as other procedures that involve embryo selection and disposal become more common. As use of preimplantation embryo selection grows, for example, there is a diminishing chance that anyone in the mainline will remain willing to throw the first stone at the Goliath of embryonic biotechnology....

In debating ESCR, we have the opportunity to ask anew whether we will encourage the routine, systematic creation and destruction of embryonic life. Will we continue to pursue a form of fertility treatment that has led to vat after vat of incipient human life? Will we allow for the creation of incipient human life merely for the sake of its destruction? Will we countenance the systematic and industrialized harvesting of human ova?

Read the whole piece.

Athanasius on 06.19.04 @ 08:52 PM EST [link]

Moral equivalence, Middle East style

On Pentecost, Latin Patriarch Michael Sabbah of Jerusalem preached on the coming of the Holy Spirit, sort of. Mostly he preached about Palestinians and Israelis:

Are we powerless or are we ignorant, not knowing how to discern between good and evil, unable to speak of it or act accordingly? It does not help to hide behind the complexity of the situation. The situation is both simple and clear: The Israelis should live in peace and security. The Palestinians, too, should live in peace and security. Israelis who kill Palestinians are evil. Palestinians who kill Israelis are evil, likewise. Killing is an evil for both, just as Military Occupation with domination and humiliation of the other is an evil, too, which has to be uprooted. We have to say this, to cry out with one single voice.

This is the "thinking" of the Churches for Middle East Peace, a mainline organization made up of the public policy offices of 19 mainlines denominations. It sounds reasonable and even-handed, but it begs dozens of questions, including:

1) Do Israelis have the right to defend themselves with deadly force if necessary?
2) Is there any moral distinction between the deliberate killing of civilians and the military killing of terrorists?
3) How are Israelis to live in "peace and security" when Hamas has dedicated itself, not to the creation of a Palestinian state, but to the total destruction of Israel?
4) If "Military Occupation" is an evil, why is Palestinian leadership so deperate to prevent Israel from pulling out of Gaza? (Answer: because Sharon proposed it, so it must be bad for Palestinians.)
5) Are Israelis who kill Palestinians in the act of trying to blow up civilians just as "evil" as the Palestinians who trying to do the blowing up?

I could go on, but you get the point. Catholic teaching is not pacifistic, and recognizes that the securing of justice sometimes necessitates the use of deadly force against those who sin against justice. It's a pity, though not surprising, that Patriarch Sabbah doesn't grant that right to Israel.
Athanasius on 06.19.04 @ 08:36 PM EST [link]

Thursday, June 17th

Euthanasia=compassion? Not quite

Wesley Smith on NRO contrasts the way Ronald Reagan and his family dealt with his Alzheimer's, and the way a Dutch doctor deals out death to his patients:

Betsy Streisand's "Memories of a Friend in the Park," a first-person observation piece published in the June 21, 2004 U.S. News and World Report, was especially touching in this regard. Streisand recounts how, as Reagan's Alzheimer's forced him out of the public limelight in the late 1990s, he frequented a park in Beverly Hills. Reagan, accompanied by his nurse, liked to sit on a park bench and watch children at play. She recalled:

"Reagan didn't speak much to adults. It was our children he was interested in. Time and again these sticky little specimens encrusted with juice and sand would come up next to him as they made their way to the bags of snacks on the bench. And he would beckon them closer...And although he gradually stopped speaking to us–and our children–we never stopped speaking to him or having the kids play close by where he could watch."

As Reagan's cognitive and verbal abilities collapsed, his human desire to love and be loved remained undiminished. Reagan's son Michael spoke emotionally to this when he described his dad's joy at hugging and being hugged. "As the years went by and he could no longer recognize me," Michael said in a tribute to his father, "I began a process of hugging him whenever I would see him." Most poignantly, the son recalled once forgetting to hug his father goodbye. As he was about to get into his car, Michael's wife told him to turn around. There in the doorway was Ronald Reagan, arms outstretched, waiting for his hug. Tears in his eyes, Michael rushed back to his father and the two embraced.

Even at the very end, love triumphed over disease. Reagan loved his Nancy deeply and intensely, and as he was breathing his last breaths, somehow, some way, he dug deep within himself and found some final reserve of devotion. He opened his eyes, recognized her, and giving her one final look, he died. Nancy Reagan and the family called his final great communication a "wonderful gift."

Now juxtapose this story of anguish — as well as love, grace, and devotion — with euthanasia in the Netherlands, which will now be applied to patients with Alzheimer's. The best view of it is found in a book by a nursing-home doctor named Bert Keizer. In Dancing with Mr. D. Keizer describes several euthanasia cases in which he provided lethal injections. In every case, he depicts the lives of frail and dying people under his care as pointless, useless, ugly, grotesque. Those with whom he interacts all seem to share these views, including his colleagues, family members of patients, and the patients themselves — allowing Keizer to kill patients without bad conscience.

One man he describes probably has lung cancer but the diagnosis is never certain. When a colleague asks, "Why rush?" while pointing out that the man isn't suffering terribly, Keizer snaps, "Is it for us to answer this question? All I know is that he wants to die more or less upright and that he doesn't want to crawl to his grave the way a dog crawls howling to the side walk after he's been hit by a car."

Keizer either doesn't know or doesn't care that with proper medical treatment, people with lung cancer don't have to die in unmitigated agony. The next day, he lethally injects the patient, telling his colleagues as he walks to the man's room, "If anyone so much as whispers cortisone [a palliative agent] or 'uncertain diagnosis,' I'll hit him."

Another patient Keizer kills is disabled by Parkinson's disease. The patient requests euthanasia, but before the act can be carried out, he hesitates after receiving a letter from his religious brother who warns that God is against suicide. This upsets Keizer, who writes: "I don't know what to do with such a wavering death wish. It's getting on my nerves. Does he want to die or doesn't he? I do hope we won't have to go over the whole business again, right from the very start."

Keizer no doubts thinks of himself as a terribly compassionate physician. Let's hope he never gets hit by a car and treated by a doctor like him.

Athanasius on 06.17.04 @ 05:41 PM EST [link]

**A new way to spell chutzpah: D-e-r-s-h-o-w-i-t-z**

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has set some kind of new standard for nerve:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., appearing Wednesday with law professors who want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush over the Iraqi prisoner abuse, declined to endorse the idea himself.

Instead, Kennedy opted for a political plug.

The best way to solve things "is to elect John Kerry," said Kennedy, appearing beside two Harvard professors at a news conference upstairs from his Senate office.

The professors presented a letter signed by more than 400 legal scholars urging members of the House and Senate to consider impeaching the president and any high level administration officials who approved the Iraqi prisoner abuses.

Among those signing the letter were former O.J. Simpson defender Alan Dershowitz and the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a former Massachusetts congressman who teaches at Georgetown University.

This is the same Dershowtiz who was quoted back in May this way:

Dershowitz even defended sexual humiliation as a good way to press Muslim detainees for critical information.

"It‘s a good thing to use women interrogators on radical Muslim extremists," he told MSNBC. "I think it‘s a good thing to make them be stripped naked. I think these are legitimate forms of interrogation in cases where we have high-level prisoners who can provide high-level information."

The top legal thinker recommended that the U.S. should unabashedly tell the world that torturing high value terrorist suspects is justified "because of the war that has been thrust upon us."

"As long as we do it in a way that we can be proud and hold our heads up and say, yes, we did this," he told MSNBC. "But we have to be smart and we have to have accountability."

Dersh's problem is that things weren't done the right way: low-level grunts with inadequate training did it; no court approved it; and–get this–Bush didn't approve it. If Bush had done so, it would have fulfilled one of Dersh's conditions for legally legitimated torture. As it is, he's apparently demanding Bush's impeachment because he wasn't involved enough in the prison scandal.

Incredible.
Athanasius on 06.17.04 @ 05:13 PM EST [link]

Wednesday, June 16th

If this isn't genocide, what is?

Even as the world laments its inaction in stopping the Rwandan genocide ten years ago, another has been happening in the Sudan. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, one of the few Western journalists to notice, tells the story of one western Sudanese village:

The Bush administration says it is exploring whether to describe the mass murder and rape in the Darfur region of Sudan as "genocide." I suggest that President Bush invite to the White House a real expert, Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a 24-year-old widow huddled under a tree here.

The world has acquiesced shamefully in the Darfur genocide, perhaps because 320,000 deaths this year (a best-case projection from the U.S. Agency for International Development) seems like one more boring statistic. So listen to Ms. Khattar's story, multiply it by hundreds of thousands, and let's see if we still want to look the other way

On March 12, Ms. Khattar was performing her predawn Muslim prayers about 4 a.m. when a Sudanese government Antonov aircraft started dropping bombs on Ab-Layha, which is made up of Zaghawa tribespeople. Moments later, more than 1,000 Janjaweed attackers rode into the village on horses and camels, backed by Sudanese government troops in trucks.

"The Janjaweed shouted: `We will not allow blacks here. We will not let Zaghawa here. This land is only for Arabs,' " Ms. Khattar recalled.

Ms. Khattar grabbed her children, and, as shots and flames raged around her, raced for a nearby forest. But her father and mother tried to protect their animals–they were yelling, "Don't take our livestock." They were both shot dead.

The attack was part of a deliberate strategy to ensure that the village would be forever uninhabitable, that the Zaghawa could never live there again. The Janjaweed poisoned wells by stuffing them with the corpses of people and donkeys. They also blew up a dam that supplied water to the farms, destroyed seven hand pumps in the village and burned all the homes and even the village school, the clinic and the mosque.

In separate interviews, I talked to more than a dozen other survivors from Ab-Layha, and they all confirm Ms. Khattar's story. By most accounts, about 100 people were massacred that day in Ab-Layha, and a particular effort was made to exterminate all men and boys, even the very young. Women and girls were sometimes allowed to flee, but the prettiest were kidnapped.

And you know what happened to them. Kristof will have more of Magboula Muhammad Khattar's story on Sunday. Read it–and then contact the State Department and let them know that this is a no-brainer, that genocide is taking place in the Sudan, and that after 20 years of government atrocities against black Sudanese (Christians, Muslims, and animists), maybe its time for the world to take action.

(Hat tip: Hampton)
Athanasius on 06.16.04 @ 10:07 AM EST [link]

Tuesday, June 15th

Just don't call it abortion

Rich Lowry on NRO asks why abortion advocates seem to be so embarrassed to speak clearly about the right they insist is the essence of human freedom:

In three lawsuits challenging the partial-birth-abortion ban after it was signed, abortion-rights advocates refused to say "partial-birth abortion." They preferred the terms "intact dilation and extraction" and "dilation and evacuation," better to keep anyone from understanding whatever they were talking about: Namely, the partial-breech delivery of a baby, until a doctor can pierce its skull with a sharp instrument and vacuum out its brain. Shannen W. Coffin, a former Justice Department official who fought in defense of the ban, recalls one pro-choice lawyer letting slip the phrase "partial-birth abortion," only to correct herself. The judge chided her, "You won't get sick if you say the words."

Actually, you might get sick if abortionists don't use euphemisms. According to Coffin, a doctor in one of the trials described crushing an infant's skull as "reduc[ing]" the "fetal calvarium" to facilitate "completion of delivery." The completed delivery, of course, of an infant with a crushed skull. Another doctor said he "separated" the "fetal calvarium" from the infant's body. Yes, and Abu Zarqawi separated Nick Berg's calvarium from his body too.

Yet another abortionist described what he does as seeking to "safely and efficiently empty the uterine cavity, rendering the woman unpregnant." For the layman, the state of "unpregnant" is what you achieve when you kill your baby. Sorry. Did I say "kill"? I meant "vacuum the uterus," or "disarticulate the fetus."

One more piece of evidence regarding "the right that dare not speak its name": the National Abortion Rights Action League recently changed its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

It is to barf.
Athanasius on 06.15.04 @ 05:56 PM EST [link]

Return of the Danish Atheist

Danish atheist/Lutheran pastor Thorkild Grosboell has done it again:

A Lutheran church minister in Denmark proclaimed false teachings among congregations which were in total contradiction to general Christian belief and Lutheranism. On Thursday 10th June, he was finally suspended from his duties after he twice ignored church orders not to repeat those beliefs from the pulpit.

You may remember Grosboell. Attempting to save his people from atavistic superstition, he told an interviewer last year that "there is no heavenly God, there is no eternal life, there is no resurrection." He was suspended by the government on the recomendation of his bishop, and then reinstated when he promised to be a good boy and uphold his ordination vows. Alas, once an evangelist, always an evangelist:

The final suspension was triggered by the quote in his recent sermon, "God had abdicated in favour of his son, hence in our favour. Therefore there is no longer a heavenly guarantee or an interfering might, there is only the Godly kingdom that is achieved by us and between us. So if it fails, there is nothing."

Translation: In the immortal words of Don McLean, "the three men [he] admires most, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the Coast, the day the music died." And since They've abandoned the world, that leaves us. If we screw it up, tough luck. That may sound somewhat contrary to the beliefs of the Lutheran Church, but Grosboell has his supporters:

It was reported by the locals, hundreds of the priests' parishioners in Taarbaek, near Copenhagen, have come to the defence of Grosboell, arguing that differences of opinion must be tolerated in the Church.

In response to the ultimatum offered, Grosboell said he did not understand the bishop's position and would never resign, though he did not deny making the comments in his sermon.

"Differences of opinion"? To defend Grosboell's position on those grounds is like saying that an advocate of drunkenness has a right to be an officer in the local Temperance Union chapter.

If Bishop Lise-Lotte Rebel does succeed in getting Grosboell booted, she should seek to soften the blow by getting him free tuition in Frank Griswold's next theological rhetoric class, entitled "How to Sound Spiritual Without Saying Anything At All."

UPDATE: From MCJ comes this Griswoldian example of the way Grosboell needs to learn to speak if he's going to hold on to his job:

"A genuine appreciation of the other in the fullness of their otherness is something that many perceive we're not very good at."

Frank Griswold: serial language abuser.
Athanasius on 06.15.04 @ 05:27 PM EST [link]

Sunday, June 13th

Next up: the repeal of original sin

To judge by John Kerry's official campaign Web site, medical paradise is just around the corner, if only the Neanderthals would get out of the way:

"Today, more than 100 million Americans have illnesses that one day could be cured or treated with stem-cell therapy. Stem cells could replace damaged heart cells or cells destroyed by cancer, offering a new lease on life to those suffering from diseases that once came with a certain death sentence. Stem cells have the power to slow the loss of a grandmother’s memory, calm the hand of an uncle with Parkinson's, save a child from a lifetime of daily insulin shots, or permanently lift a best friend from his wheelchair."

What he means, of course, is embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). Adult stem cell research is going on full-bore, and is proving fruitful. ESCR, meanwhile, has so far proven entirely disappointing. Dr. Wolfgang Lillge, writing in 21st Century Science and Technology, says that "Embryonic stem cells have not yet been used for even one therapy, while adult stem cells have already been successfully used in numerous patients, including for cardiac infarction (death of some of the heart tissue)." Furthermore, he goes on to say that the problems with ESCR are overwhelming, whereas those with adult cells are minimal, hence their use in current therapies. The bottom line: the miracle cures expected form ESCR are very unlikely, certainly within the lifetime of the people whose salvation ESCR is supposed to be.

Recognizing that with progress comes ethical concerns, Kerry said we can resolve them with goodwill and good sense.

"Believe it or not, there was a time when some questioned the morality of heart transplants. Not too long ago, we heard the same kind of arguments against the biotechnology research that now saves stroke victims and those with leukemia."

Believe it or not, Senator, there are lots of folks out here who 1) think there's a big difference between transplanting organs from those who have died and creating human life as a disposable means to an end; and 2) recognize that "goodwill and common sense" are hardly adequate substitutes for rigorous ethical thinking and a recognition that science doesn't always take us where we should go. And by the way, you're going to have to be more specific about the arguments made against other kinds of biotech research. Leaving purely Luddite hysterics aside, I have no idea what you're talking about.

"The medical discoveries that come from stem cell are crucial next steps in humanity's uphill climb. And part of this nation's greatness lies in the fact that we have led the world in great medical discoveries, with our breakthroughs and our beliefs going hand-in-hand. If we pursue the limitless potential of our science–and trust that we can use it wisely–we will save millions of lives and earn the gratitude of future generations."

This reminds me of an exchange from the 50s sci-fi movie The Thing. Idealistic scientist is extolling scientific progress, and mentions that "we split the atom." Cynical reporter interrupts and says, "And that sure made the world happy, didn't it?" I mean, really: the "limitless potential of our science"? When did man become God, Senator? And "trust we can use it wisely"? When was the doctrine of original sin repealed, Senator? We're talking about one of the most potentially destructive technologies imaginable, one that, as a side effect, reduces human life to a tool to be manipulated as we see fit. Personally, I don't see the pie-in-the-sky long-shot possibilities as worth the kind of damage that permitting ESCR would do to a society that has already grown extraordinarily coarse in its attitudes towards life. Especially when there's a safe alternative already available.
Athanasius on 06.13.04 @ 02:56 PM EST [link]