Joe's daughter

Continuing the theme developed here, here and here, but, unlike my efforts, carrying the weight of lived experience: the father of a Down's Syndrome child responds to a caring eugenicist. No quote; read it all, if it's the only thing you read this week. (via - revealing samples of 'progressive thought' in the comments)

Because this says more than a thousand tomes of systematic theology about the difference that faith in a loving God makes. The parent whose faith empowers him with the love needed to raise a handicapped child, versus the ones who could have been perfect parents if only they'd got a perfect child, but decided the one they did get was, sadly, too 'flawed' to fit in with their lifestyle. Two different gods and, as somebody or other said, you can serve one or the other but not both.

Do I have what it takes to raise a Down's Syndrome child? I think I can answer that very simply: NO. Left to my own devices, I'm with the caring eugenicists. What I do have, and what anybody can have if they just decide they want it, is the ability to pray for Joe's faith, courage and love. And the willingness to believe that prayers are answered. So, thank you Joe. And thank you Joe's daughter.

Breeding the Übermensch

There is evidence to suggest that gay men suffer from significantly higher than average levels of mental illness. It is clear that they are considerably less likely than heterosexuals to succeed in forming permanent committed relationships. They are at high risk from a life-threatening and currently incurable viral infection. The obstacles to having children are obvious. And they continue to face significant levels of social stigma.

So if it proves possible to identify a gene which predisposes individuals to this condition, would it not be a kindness to sufferers to put them out of their misery before they see the light of day, and give parents the opportunity to produce non-defective offspring? Would this not be an act of caring and love?

The question is one for Johann Hari, of that persuasion himself and an enthusiast for 'liberal eugenics'. Personally, I believe that Mr Hari's existence is unequivocally a good thing. But maybe that's just one of my primitive superstitions.

Abortion, Amnesty International and a confession

The other links in this post are optional, but not this one. [I've mislaid my source, but I'm fairly sure it was Laban Tall]. A sample of the things that become possible once we grow out of the primitive delusion that there is a God and men and women are created in his image: eugenics, once the province of scary men in jackboots, is now available on the NHS.

Amnesty International think there's a universal human right at stake here. Hint: not the unborn child's. As Shuggy says:-

'The only conclusion one can draw is that Amnesty International's official position now is that the unborn child is not human.'

Shuggy's so right about Amnesty, and it's a real shame. The beauty of the organization used to be that it did exactly what it said on the tin. If you got locked up, or worse, for saying the wrong thing about your government, Amnesty would speak up for you, whether you were a communist in Pinochet's Chile or a born-again Christian in the Gulag. But somewhere along the way mission creep set in - doubtless partly through straightforward corporate megalomania, but mainly, I think, because they got hijacked by the people who think there's no such thing as politically impartial and that anything they consider desirable must be a basic human right.

They're the same crowd who run the aid charities. There's no point in giving to Oxfam, Christian Aid or Cafod these days if you just want to help poor people. You need to believe they are in possession of the magic formula that will Make Poverty History, and not be worried that the formula begins by systematically ignoring the countries which are actually succeeding in making poverty history.

Frau Grumpy (patronizing sexist reference just in case Catherine Bennett happens to read this) agrees with me about Amnesty, so there'll be no Amnesty Christmas cards from the Grumpy household this year, I'm afraid.

As for abortion: it begins to look my Rubicon crossing. This is where it all gets deadly serious. I'm shocked that abortion is being used to weed out club feet and cleft palates (jaw defects may not yet have been taken as grounds for a termination, but we must assume that there is nothing in principle to prevent that from happening: the thought fills me with particular horror since Frau Grumpy, like Joanna Jepson, has one). But there's something else: I'm shocked that it has taken a chance click on a link from a blog to tell me that this is going on. Of course I could blame the media I relied on before I started blogging, which have no interest in enlightening me. If I'm honest with myself, though, I could have taken steps to inform myself, and I didn't.

I was always uncomfortable with the way the 'woman's right to choose' slogan is chanted at full volume to drown out discussion of the ethical assumptions it rests on. But I've been all too ready to suppress my doubts and go along with the left/liberal herd, accepting that if women are granted the power of life and death over their babies of course they will all exercise it responsibly - and even if they don't it's no business of mine.

And yet human lives are being discarded - lives which, for many a bien-pensant liberal, are apparently of less account than a hunted fox or a laboratory rat. I am quite certain there are people who know me who, if they read this post, would take it as conclusive proof that I have become a reactionary, misogynistic turncoat. But there's a bit too much at stake to be influenced by the fear of losing friends.

AIDS and received wisdom

So it looks as if the Vatican is about to soften its line on condoms. About time too, eh?

A small piece of news from Pope Benedict's native land (here in German): 2005 was a bumper year for the rubber goods industry. In response to the huge "mach's mit" (literally "do it with") public health campaign (featuring posters with multi-coloured condoms arranged into pictures of teddy bears, sheep, etc. - I pity parents of inquisitive seven-year-olds) the number of singles under 45 using condoms rose from 70% to 75%. Congratulations all round. And new cases of HIV infection? Well, now you mention it, they were up 13% on 2004.

My entirely redundant advice to the Pope: humane pragmatism, yes, but not at the expense of the home truths that a sick sexual culture needs to be told.