EASTER Sunday and the Lord has risen. You don’t even have to be a Christian to feel his presence. God is everywhere. He has inveigled his way into the British election campaign by way of the abortion debate. He is at the Vatican, where the Pope is dying, and at the Las Pinellas hospice, in Tampa, Florida, presiding over the last hours of Terri Schiavo’s existence. By this Easter morning, she may already be dead. George W Bush and his brother, Jeb, could not, in the end, prevail on the US judicial system to order that her feeding tube be replaced. Unlike God, who spent fewer than three days entombed, Ms Schiavo has had a long wait in the anteroom between oblivion and deliverance.
‘Terri died 15 years ago,’ her husband Michael said. ‘It’s time for her to be with the Lord, like she wanted to be.’ While all informed doctors confirmed she was irredeemably brain damaged, her campaign website, supported by her parents, was upbeat to the last. A question in a Q&A panel asked: ‘Is Terri in an unresponsive coma?’ ‘Absolutely not!’ read the response. ‘Terri is a purposefully interactive, alert, curious, lovely young woman who lives with a very serious disability.’
As most Americans agreed, this grim tussle over a ruined life should have been for her family and the law. Instead, the President and Congress muscled in, making Terri Schiavo a peepshow doomed to take her small step to death before an audience of millions. The Schiavo case, not simply a parable of prurience and opportunism, illustrates the rise of God the politician, just as God the theologian sees his influence wane.
The worldwide Anglican communion is in disarray, and only 16 per cent of Britons say that religion is very important to them. Yet God is suddenly the referee of choice for a secular nation. Leading churchmen want to take abortion to the ballot box and though the Prime Minister warns evangelical Christians that faith and politics don’t mix, the religious right smells power.
So thank God for science. In what promised to be a counter-blow for rationalism, the science and technology select committee last week produced its report on reproductive technology. Parents, MPs decided, should be able to select their baby’s sex. A ban on reproductive cloning cannot yet be justified. Research on animal and human hybrids should go ahead.
Even those who think God and politics a dubious mix might flinch from a cocktail of man and mouse. But the most glaring example of a procedure known as chimeric experimentation was the committee itself. The parliamentary equivalent of a breeding attempt between a yak and a wildebeest produced a split-down-the-middle hybrid with five of its 10 members in revolt. One, Geraldine Smith, later claimed the report could ‘pave the way to the kind of eugenics with which Nazi Germany was once experimenting.’
That, frankly, is daft. Five blokes equal a quorum for an indoor football side, not the crucible of a master race. The fact that the brave new worlders could not even get their peers to endorse the finished product suggests that the public will take some convincing. Which is a pity because many of the ideas are bold and right.
The trouble is that the report, in avoiding any discussion or middle ground, plays to the same rules as religious hardliners. In its post-ethical premise, the very lucrative fertility market should be let rip and clinics need not consider the welfare of any potential child. Despite the disparity of their creeds, extreme libertarianism and extreme repression appear to share the same icy soul.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
