The Wonderful Fount o' Fundies

Fundies Say the Darndest things has led me to yet another goldmine of fundamentalist lunacy. This guy, Bill Meuhlenberg, is especially interesting because of his sycophantic enthusiasm for my arch nemesis, Leon Kass. He's all with the "reproductive technology is destroying th family" bullshit.

The article to which I have linked is a review of the book, Biotechnology and the Assault on Parenthood by some stupid asshole. In the review, Meuhlenberg goes off on the ubiquitous paranoia about reproductive technology, surrogacy, and the like.

According to Meuhlenberg, "Indeed, if personhood is reduced to a simple collection of atoms and DNA, then any sense of human dignity and human rights disappears, for it is senseless to talk of atoms having rights." That would be true if people abandoned the recognition of sentience and self-worth as guarantors of dignity, which would not be the case in the implementation of any reproductive technology. He's right that it's senseless to speak of atoms having rights, because atoms don't have sentience, self-worth, or the capacity to suffer. It is senseless to bestow rights upon anything that either does not or can not value them. It is for this reason that it is just as senseless to bestow rights upon embryos.

The argument that usually follows from fundies when this assertion is made is that embryos have the potential to become something that can have the capacity to value rights. I feel, however, that the point at which this potential is given weight is arbitrary. An embryo has little more potential to become a person than a sperm does. Without a woman's body, an embryo has no more chance of survival than a sperm. Even if there were a significant increase in potential at the time of conception, a sperm still has some potential, but is still not regarded as having the dignity of a person, so potential alone is clearly not enough for a mass of cells to be deserving of rights.

Guys like Meuhleneberg are so paranoid that they believe allowing people to regard anything that happens to have human genes as less valuable than a thinking, feeling, reasoning human being will inevitably lead to denying rights to all human beings. They can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea that human dignity is based on more than just the possession of human genes.