Credit: The Daily Beast

A research team in China genetically engineered human embryos this week. Beyond unethical, the practice adds fire to an already heated issue: reproductive freedom.

That uneasy nether-realm where genes and ethics meet up with possibly mad scientists was exposed again this week as China announced they were “editing” the genes of human embryos.

Immediately and convincingly, scientific leaders from the U.S. stepped up to declare this to be a bad idea and even a very bad idea—though not because they were not curious about what experimentation could reveal. Actually I suspect they are itching to do the same sort of work just to see what happens—a basic and ubiquitous childlike curiosity resides at the core of any decent scientist. Rather they, like any watcher of Jurassic Park, are worried about the law of unintended consequences. What if something goes wrong and we make a 40-foot tall linebacker who eats people and ozone for lunch?

The entire enterprise is extremely sci-fi still, easily decades […]

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Credit: workplacecoachblog.com

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. “Could the plant […]

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From the moment Barack Obama appeared on the national stage, conservatives have been searching for the best way to describe the danger he poses to America’s traditional way of life. Secularism? Check. Socialism? Sure. A tendency to apologize for America’s greatness overseas? That, too. But how to tie them all together?

Gradually, a unifying theme took hold. “At the heart of the debate over Obama’s program,” declared Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in an influential 2010 National Review cover story, is “the survival of American exceptionalism.” Finally, a term broad and historically resonant enough to capture the magnitude of the threat. A year later, Newt Gingrich published A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, in which he warned that “our government has strayed alarmingly” from the principles that made America special. Mitt Romney deployed the phrase frequently in his 2012 campaign, asserting that President Obama “doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do.” The term, which according to Factiva appeared in global English-language publications fewer than 3,000 times during the Bush Administration, has already appeared more than 10,000 times since Obama became president.
Ironically, the people most responsible for eroding American exceptionalism are the very conservatives […]

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VATICAN CITY (AP) – The Vatican on Monday sharply criticized a book on sexuality written by a prominent American nun, saying it contradicted church teaching on issues like masturbation, homosexuality and marriage and that its author had a ‘defective understanding’ of Catholic theology.

The Vatican’s orthodoxy office said the book, ‘Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics’ by Sister Margaret Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy religious order and emeritus professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School, posed ‘grave harm’ to the faithful.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that in the 2006 book, Farley either ignored church teaching on core issues of human sexuality or treated it as merely one opinion among many.

Farley said Monday she never intended the book to reflect current official Catholic teaching. Rather, she said, she wrote it to explore sexuality via various religious traditions, theological resources and human experience.

The Farley critique, signed by the American head of the congregation, Cardinal William Levada, comes amid the Vatican’s recent crackdown on the largest umbrella group of American sisters. The Vatican last month essentially imposed martial law on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, accusing it of undermining church teaching and imposing […]

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A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers. The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews. Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study, wrote that the ‘funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study.’ ‘My personal investment is in doing reputable research,’ said Gartrell. ‘This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it.’ Gay parenting remains a controversial issue, with debates about topics including the children’s psychological adjustment, their parents’ sexual orientation and adoption restrictions. Wendy Wright, president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values, questioned the legitimacy of the findings from a study funded by gay […]

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