The church this, the church that

The effort to ban hybrid embryos failed.

The Roman Catholic Church has branded the use of hybrid embryos as “monstrous” and says tinkering with life in this way is immoral.

So what? Who cares what the Roman Catholic Church says? The Roman Catholic church says a lot of things, and many of them are morally execrable. The Roman Catholic Church also does a lot of things, and many of those stink too. The Roman Catholic Church worries far too much about cells in dishes and far too little about existing, thinking people. The Roman Catholic Church gets too much respectful attention, and it gets this respectful attention by staging moral panics about things that are not morally significant. That’s a foolish arrangement.

And of course the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t think ‘tinkering with life’ is immoral. It has no objection to agronomy or antibiotics, for instance. It doesn’t mean ‘life,’ it means ‘what it chooses to think of as human life.’ It gets a rhetorical boost by calling it just ‘life,’ and it shouldn’t get away with it.

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