Gordon Brown shows Vatican his belly over embryos.
He’s done it. After an Easter weekend dither-athon with the Catholic leaders of England, Wales and Scotland piling pressure on (while denying to cameras they were interfering in politics) Prime Minister Gordon Brown has shown belly to the Vatican and allowed his own MPs and Cabinet Ministers to vote against a government embryology bill. Weak.
So, a slice of British science and health policy now risks being dictated by a bunch of old men (none of them scientists or doctors) under the direction of an old man in Rome who takes his orders from a sky fairy. A sky fairy who has done remarkably few Personal Appearances since cameras came along, preferring instead the safer route of manifesting in tortillas, pieces of toast and aubergines (eggplants), and therefore not being able heal the lame or to take questions on the vexatious matters of experimentation on blastocyts. Which were not known about when the gospels were written.
Whether or not people choose to mumble incantations inside grey buildings with stained glass windows is up to them. When they try to hamstring our scientific research and our heath care because of their superstitions, they need telling to butt right out of public life. Let’s remember the aims of the people we’re dealing with here:
• No contraception
• No abortion, at all for any reason
• No IVF
• No embryo research
It’s nothing to do with science, it’s to do with dogma that seeks to deny women reproductive rights and privileges a ball of cells over an ailing human being.
As for prayers and relics: well screw those for a pious fraud. My multiply handicapped foster sister has been to Lourdes many a time, showered with prayers, choked with incense, immersed in ‘holy’ grotto water. It doesn’t work, but it takes a lot of cash off people who go in the hope of a miraculous cure. And I’d just like to inflict her kind of daily, hourly discomfort on anyone, anyone who says it ennobles and makes excuses for the charade of Lourdes. Gordon has just been done up like a kipper by a bunch of superstitious fraudsters.
