The World According to Oatney

Politics without morality is dead

It has been announced in the last 24 hours that scientists in South Korea have essentially been able to clone stem cells by forcing a human egg to divide, injecting it with another person's DNA and then forcing it to begin development. This is something straight out of Huxley, and opens up a host of moral and ethical questions. It could lead to a very immoral and elitist society, and has the potential to lead to the creation of an entire race of human clones.

This news is more than just a frightening scientific development, because it also shows that moral and ethical questions cannot be avoided by legislators and people in public life. Because this new scientific procedure makes it possible to clone human beings as well as clone stem cells, Congress and state legislatures will have to revisit the whole issue of human cloning and the moral questions involved in this kind of scientific development. All this proves is that politics must deal with moral and ethical questions. We cannot divorce morality and faith from public policy, as many in the Democratic and a few in the Republican Party would like to do. The two cannot be separated because eventually, as with this issue of stem cell and human cloning, moral and ethical questions will arise that are influenced by faith and belief or a lack thereof. If we divorce faith and morality from public life, we leave no rationale for deciding such complex ethical questions.

May faith and morality rule the day, and may the Democrats finally learn that those things are not to be shunned in the corridors of power.

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 9:21 AM