Planting Pro-Clone memes....

Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Mon, 10 Mar 1997 20:50:20 -0500


I was at a family get together this weekend in Rhode Island, a 60th
birthday for an uncle. i was sitting with my parents, and several uncles
and aunts when the subject of cloning came up (they are all practicing
Catholics). I stated that I could not understand how anyone who was
pro-life could be anti-cloning, as cloning is simply one more option for
creating life.

They replied that cloning was not a natural act of creation, to which
I asked them if they were for in vitro procedures and use of fertility
drugs. They said yes. I said that those practices are not natural, and
use of fertility drugs frequently causes the production of clones in the
womb (commonly known as twins), and if cloning were to be outlawed, then
twins, triplets, etc would have to be aborted to comply with laws.

Given this, they then said that they didn't like the concept of
individuals going off and having their own children and raising them as
single parents (hidden message: anti-gay parenting, anti-single mother),
which was in their opion enough of a reason to outlaw it. I said that
the procedure would most likely be used in cases where one parent in a
couple is either infertile or has a genetic trait that would cause undue
suffering and hardship for the child, giving parent the option of having
a clone of only one parent (the "clean" one) that they can both raise.
They replied that parents can be artificially inseminated and can use
surrogate mothers, to which I retorted that given the total disregard of
the courts for surrogate parenting agreements, as seen in numberous
custody battles in the courts, causing extensive harm emotionally and
financially to the families involved, it is a better solution to keep
things as much "in the family" as possible, which is what cloning can
do. There would be no third party source of genetic material to
complicate things legally.

Given this, they agreed that cloning was indeed a pro-family
reproductive option.....

-- 
TANSTAAFL!!!

Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ President retroman@tpk.net Northstar Technologies Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com

Website: http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/ Now Featuring: Mikey's Animatronic Factory http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/animations.htm My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ Transhumanist, Inventor, Webmaster, Ski Guide, Entrepreneur, Artist, Outdoorsman, Libertarian, Arms Exporter-see below. ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}