Editorial Raelpolitik
EDITORIAL Raelpolitik A long year for U.S. Catholics ended with the belated resignation of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law. Law's departure seems to promise a new beginning, at least in Boston, for...
...The damage done to the church's credibility and moral stature by this scandal will take years, if not decades, to restore...
...Even if the procedure is successful, a cloned child faces the likelihood of future genetic abnormalities or illness...
...The administration has yet to provide evidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction...
...The technique itself is prone to failure and amounts to experimenting on a human being...
...An obscure religious sect, the Raelians, has allegedly taken this step toward the eugenic future...
...The North Korean threat has also complicated the situation in Iraq...
...At the same time, hardly a week goes by when another accused priest is not suspended from ministry in one diocese or another...
...In the meantime, the prospect of war in Korea should help this president acquire a new respect for the value of diplomacy, something he has been too dismissive of in the past...
...Law's departure seems to promise a new beginning, at least in Boston, for victims of sexual abuse as well as the church as a whole...
...Unregulated biotechnology is not the only danger the new year brings...
...In addition to Cardinal Law's departure, the year ended with the announcement, yet to be verified, of the birth of the first human clone, a girl portentously named Eve...
...The effects of the scandal are especially unfortunate because a vigorous Catholic perspective is needed on the most pressing issues of the day...
...Just as important, in allowing a parent to determine the entire genetic makeup of an offspring, cloning threatens the dignity and identity of that child and opens wide the door to every sort of genetic manipulation...
...Bush argues that containment and diplomacy can work with North Korea but have failed with Iraq...
...As President George W. Bush increases the diplomatic pressure and military threat against Iraq, he has been caught off guard by another "rogue" nation...
...There's a broad consensus, within both the scientific and religious communities, that "reproductive" cloning should be prohibited...
...That sounds like hypocrisy, necessity, or hokum...
...Still it is progress of a sort...
...By expelling UN inspectors and threatening to restart its nuclear weapons program, North Korea has called Bush's bluff about the U.S...
...Bush's strategy of tough talk and dismissive diplomacy seems poorly designed to deal with the dangers inherent in the fifty-year standoff between North and South Korea...
...Other scientists have promised to produce human clones within the year...
...Whatever the eventual legal status of so-called therapeutic cloning for stem-cell research, Congress should act quickly to outlaw the cloning of human beings, which, as the bioethicist Leon Kass notes, is a fateful step away from procreation toward the manufacturing of human life...
...determination to strike "preemptively" against terrorist states possessing weapons of mass destruction...
...Bush says a diplomatic solution is needed in Korea...
...Both morally and politically, Bush must show that Iraq has not come clean before he can expect support for military action...
...But how can he make the case for war against Iraq, which has acceded to UN inspections and does not appear to possess nuclear weapons, if he is willing to tolerate North Korea, which already has weapons of mass destruction and is threatening to build more...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
