THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

ARE WE JUST GOING TO PANIC, OR ARE WE GOING TO APPLY MORALITY TO GENETICS? | 2001-01-20

A baby ape has just been genetically altered, and everybody is up in arms.

Until now, fashionable morality did not apply to genetics, because if you worry about genetics, you are anaziwhowsantstokillsixmillionjews.

To be respectable, I have to agree with today's genetics policy. Today, the countries in the world whose children are starving and live in misery produce the maximum number of children. The only morality we have is to wait for the hundreds of millions of children to be produced, and then cut back on families in developed countries so the third world overflow can move in.

That's the only "morality" we have, and if you question it, you're anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

It is moral to let any teenage welfare mother do anything to the gene pool she has the physical capacity to do. We breed for stupidity and ugliness the way Hitler tried to breed for Aryanness, but no one dares to question today's immoral genetic "morality."

Sure, scientists playing with the gene pool is dangerous. But what can they do to us that we are not, in the name of morality, doing to ourselves right now? If our so-called morality, agreed on by liberals and "Christians" (and a "Christian" is NOT a Christian) keeps on the way it is going, we all know very well the horror our descendants are going to face.

But you can't say that, because conservatives are like dogs waiting for a word from their master. If the liberals say "anzaiwhowsantstokillsicxmillionjews" or any other cliché, conservatives cease to pretend to have any kind of morality at all.

Nobody knows exactly what to do about cloning or genetic alteration, but everybody is demanding meetings and discussions on the subject - RIGHT NOW!

But if I bring up the genetic catastrophe we are uncritically sanctioning now, everybody tells me I have to know exactly what to do about it before I mention it. Even thinking about it makes me anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

It goes contrary to all of our conservative instincts, but it seems to me that scientists simply couldn't do much more harm to future generations than we are doing now.

What I am saying is that no person who joins in the fashionable panic about evil scientists has any right to open his mouth until he has the courage to take a stand on TODAY'S genetic immorality.