Hard Science • Marriage
Not the Issue • Redirect Religion
Don't Frown on Town • New
and Improved
 
Hard Science
Editors:
Georgann Eubanks' article on stem-cell
research [January-February 2002] was interesting and comprehensive.
The one aspect that did not receive enough attention, I think, is
the flight of private investment from such companies as Geron. The
Wall Street Journal has published several news articles about the
financial anxieties of researchers (some of whom have had to take
ownership, absent more "venture capital" being made available).
Geron has patented many of the discoveries made at the University
of Wisconsin, and the acrimony about these patents worsened not long
after the Bush announcement.
Moreover, according to an article in The New York Times, the frozen
embryos at IVF labs are proving not to be very useful for the extraction
of high-quality stem cells. In this unregulated, multi-billion dollar
industry, the prospect of federal tax dollars for the frozen embryos
must have looked very good, indeed.
The flight of private investors is due to lack of results, after
years of investigation and experiments. Some medical scientists
are concerned about reports on the treatment of Parkinson's patients,
in which fingernails and hair were produced after infusions of embryonic
stem cells into the patients' brains. The work was done in Japan,
incidentally.
As with the furor over "human cloning," much agony about
"ethical decisions" could be avoided by examining the
hard science, not the puff science of our news-media representatives,
many of whom know little or nothing about medicine (much less genetics)
but who know a good story when they see it.
Odessa Southern Elliott '56 (via e-mail)
P.S. In the fall of 1952, I registered to
take a zoology lab course for no better reason than the sophomore
across the hall offered me her lab kit and textbook for $5. Somehow,
the registrar permitted me to take a pre-med section, although I
wasn't pre-med. It was a horrendous struggle, but I have always
valued what I learned in that course. And I signed up the next year
to take zoo genetics! I was thrilled to find that I could read The
Double Helix and understand it. I was sorry to note that Duke no
longer offers the doctorate in zoology. In my years, it was considered
impossible to master both botany and zoology, even at the undergraduate
level.
Marriage Not the Issue
Editors:
In the article "Faith Fires
Back" [January-February 2002], Stanley Hauerwas identifies
a lack of "linguistic discipline," with specific reference
to the institution of marriage, as a barrier to meaningful debate
on how the church should deal with homosexuality (pages 13, 46). His
remarks miss the point; the state of the marital institution--however
one may view it--is not the real issue, and would not, in any case,
provide a reasoned basis to deny marriage between gay people. What
is at issue is the church's attitude toward our fellow humans who
happen to be homosexual.
Hauerwas suggests a definition of marriage as "a calling
that makes promises of lifelong monogamous fidelity in which children
are welcomed" creates a "problem" for homosexual
marriage. He makes it clear that "fidelity" refers to
sex, not love. So Christian marriage is a sanctified space within
which sex, otherwise harmful to one's spiritual health, is allowed,
subject to constraints (faithful, monogamous, etc.). It also provides
support to the committed couple in their efforts to sustain their
relationship over time (Hauerwas' "hard discipline over many
years").
Until we get to the part about children, I see no way in which
this definition would exclude homosexuals in committed relationships.
Indeed, if protection from the harmful consequences of unbridled
sex is truly a foundation for marriage, homosexuals would seem to
have fully as great a need for such protection as heterosexuals.
And committed same-sex couples surely could derive the same support
the institution of marriage provides to faithful, monogamous, long-term
heterosexual relationships--and thus be helped, as Hauerwas says
he wants to do, to "avoid the sexual wilderness we live in."
Hauerwas' "children are welcomed" presents a barrier
to same-sex marriage only if it refers to at least the possibility
of biological offspring. But this still does not allow us to discriminate
between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples unable to reproduce
due to physical inadequacies. And what of voluntarily childless
couples? How do they rate under the Hauerwas definition, compared
with same-sex couples eager to adopt? So we still haven't found
a bright-line criterion for segregating homosexual goats from heterosexual
sheep at the church door.
The foregoing highlights the basic problem: marriage is essentially
a side issue. (Though, as we in Vermont are well aware from our
experience in instituting marriage-like civil unions for same-sex
couples, it has provided the fuel for some blazing public controversy.)
The real issue is what is the nature of homosexuality. Opponents
of homosexual marriage--or any formal recognition of homosexual
unions--tend to hew closely to a biblical line condemning homosexuality
as unnatural and an "abomination" (Leviticus 18: 22).
But there is information, not available in biblical times, that
strongly supports the view that homosexuality is innate, like left-
or right-handedness or heterosexuality. In particular, homosexuality
is no longer classified as a psychiatric disorder by the American
Psychiatric Association. On the specific issue of unnaturalness,
there is a growing body of evidence that homosexuality is not restricted
to humans, but also is characteristic of numerous other species.
St. Paul, with Leviticus, is a prime source for the Bible-based
condemnation of homosexuality. But Paul was no fan of sex of any
kind, homo or hetero, and inveighed often and at length against
fornication. In the case of fornication, Paul famously provided
his grudging endorsement of marriage ("better to marry than
to burn") as an escape hatch. In light of the additional information,
supporting the view that homosexuality is as innate and "natural"
as heterosexuality, might he have responded to the idea of expanding
marriage to include homosexuals in a similar vein? Would not such
response be entirely consistent with the spirit of Christian charity
so beautifully expressed in 1 Corinthians 13?
I fully recognize that I may have misinterpreted Professor Hauerwas.
But given the nature of this issue, and the way the sides have tended
to line up, it seems doubly unfortunate that he, as both a distinguished
theologian and faculty member at such a distinguished institution
of higher learning, should not have taken the opportunity to introduce
a clear note of reason as well as compassion to this benighted issue.
David J. Klock (via e-mail)
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