Oh look, Church lead­ers are up in arms about some new piece of legis­la­tion. Are we really sur­prised? After so many thou­sands of years of them pro­claim­ing that any­thing which makes them, per­son­ally, feel uncom­fort­able is evil, how can we be any­thing but bored when they keep at it in the present time? Last year it was equal rights for homo­sexu­als, this year it’s advanced research into human genet­ics. Before long it’ll be arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, neur­os­cience, or some other thing which chal­lenges, and advances, our view of ourselves.

Oh, and of course the cries are going to be led by the Cath­olic Church this time; they’re the ones with a huge theo­lo­gical invest­ment in the sub­ject. We’re talk­ing about a cult whose insane super­sti­tions about human genetic mater­ial lead them to declare male mas­turb­a­tion a “sin against God”, and to deduce that tens of mil­lions of people in the third world dying of AIDS and hun­dreds of mil­lions more liv­ing in miser­able, starving poverty due to over­pop­u­la­tion is prob­ably OK com­pared to the much greater sin of let­ting them use con­doms. These are people whose core val­ues are utterly incom­pat­ible with the human rights and human dig­nity they claim to be the guard­i­ans of, and our response to their claims of being some sort of author­ity on eth­ics (espe­cially bioeth­ics) should be to laugh dis­dain­fully and get on with try­ing to make the world a bet­ter place.