Stem Cell Murder and The American Kindermord

[Executive summary: Embryonic stem cell research is an exercise in state sponsored child killing, and the President who approved it has much to answer for.]

Waiting yesterday afternoon in a dentist's office, I was forced to do something I normally avoid like the plague: to watch the TV news. Now, it was a Fox TV News station, and you'd think a "good Republican" like me would eat it up, right?

No.

It was an announcement of Mr. Obama's new ukaz decreeing that newly conceived children can be disassembled by scientists and destroyed for trivial purposes at the expense of taxpaying Catholics and other prolifers throughout the nation.

The Fox news report on the subject consisted of a press conference where a University of Michigan researcher, one Doktor Fredrick Fronkenschteen, emoting gleefully and burbling that he can now kill babies without let or hinderance. The reporter practically smothered him in butterfly kisses. (I'd put it much more pointedly but I'm trying to keep this a family blog. OK, family-ish.)

Now, the Obama decree doesn't "legalize" embryonic stem cell research: even the Dub couldn't ban it outright, alas. But it now puts the U.S. Taxpayer's Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on medical experiments which are as abominable as Frankenstein's and as pointless as Mengele's: for there has been not a single usable scientific advance in this field from the beginning.

To those who think that this abomination is "about time," let me remind you of a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

There ... are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.

Let me be clear here. The newly fertilized egg+sperm becomes a diploid cell called a zygote. The zygote is half-mother, half-father. In other words, neither mother nor father, but part of each. (If this sounds familiar, it had better!) As it divides, and divides again, over and over, it begins the journey which, uninterrupted, ends in (in my case) a fat 47 year old typing nonrandom text on my blog this morning.

That journey is an analog continuum, not a digitized, divisible phenomenon. THERE IS NO POINT BETWEEN ZYGOTE AND FAT GUY where one can say "NOW this thing is a person." No. It is a person ab initio. What Q.S. Tertullian knew intuitively 1800 years ago is explicitly true to this day: 'That which will be a man is a man already. The whole fruit is present in the seed.'

(But what of implantation? That is a matter of mere technology. You can implant zygote A in woman C after sticking it in fridge B at near-zero-degrees Kelvin for a year, or ten. That doesn't modify the personhood of the zygote, even if it could damage its DNA. Furthermore, the creation of an artificial womb is at this time not impossible, merely pointlessly expensive. Ergo: The zygote is a person in its own right regardless of where it lay.)

Obama's ukaz is an act of hideous, destructive age discrimination. It is nought but a decretal that the zygote is not a person, and as such, you can treat it like an industrial resource. This last hundred years, the human race has already been there, done that, and it wasn't pretty the last time it happened.

The newly conceived child in a petri dish, being cannibalistically disassembled for the benefit of the scientist who exercises absolute power over it for personal and professional gain, is as much a naked victim of discrimination as was any individual told to stand in the back of a Birmingham bus. More so: for the bus rider was, at least, likely to survive the experience. The child will not.

The Carpenter put it very well: "As you do to the least of My brothers, so you do unto Me."

And the Founders did too: "...that all Men are created Equal." Indeed. Everyone--Ozymandias King of Kings, Charles Manson, Little Lord Fauntelroy, the least of children lost to stillbirth: ALL, but ALL, are created equal: we all start as a zygote. I may not be a woman, but I sure as God used to be a zygote....embryo....fetus. And so were y ou.

Obama should understand this. In fact, I deem that does understand this. Yet he chooses to do this regardless. It makes him one with those who, throughout this past century of crime, destroy the weak and the innocent for political gain. And his soul will stand sore charged for the wasteful destruction of innocent prenatal life that it will bring.

The Black Book of the American Kindermord--the Massacre of the Innocents--has acquired a new and bloody page. Kyrie elieson.