State Morality and the Myth of Moral Relativism

From time to time I slip into 'blog apathy' and simply can't bring myself to write posts, which is why I haven't posted since November. Things have also been rather hectic in my life recently (nothing sinister, merely purely professional challenges that I am quite happy to tackle). But the world is moving fast and lots of things are going on. No time to comment on them all, but an issue that has been addressed more and more frequently in the British Catholic blogosphere is the government's bill to teach sex education to children as young as five - including information on contraception from eight years of age and on abortion from 11 years. Initially these provisions were made mandatory also for 'faith schools' - such as Catholic schools which absolutely could not in good conscience teach a curriculum that said contraception and especially abortion were perfectly legitimate options. After much consternation, including a sharp comment from Pope Benedict, an amendment was introduced that opened up for such schools to be able to present the views of the denominations they are affiliated with - but they would still be required to present opposing views in addition to their own, including providing information to little girls about how they can have sex without getting pregnant and how they can have their babies killed if it happens anyway!!

Though the government will deny it, what it is doing is passing moral judgments in the manner of religious authorities. It is not possible to divorce sex & relationship education from morality: no matter whether you teach that abortion is acceptable or unacceptable, you are expounding a particular morality. Even if you desire to remain 'neutral' by presenting both sides of the argument and leave it to the pupils to decide you are still sending the message that both are legitimate options in their own right. This shows the flaw of Moral Relativism - though it purports to be 'neutral' and 'balanced', by arguing for the moral equivalence of multiple paths of moral reasoning, it is itself passing a moral judgment that it is perfectly legitimate for a person to abitrarily select one such path or the other. As such the very concept of Moral Relativism is self-contradictory, because it itself presupposes the existence of the very Absolutist principles it claims do not exist (it is readily demonstrable that the statement "Everything is relative" is self-contradictory because it is Absolutist - as long as one believes in logic).

(Interestingly, secular schools are not required - or even allowed - to present more than one side of the arguments on S&R issues. This does not seem particularly 'pluralist'. Indeed, most contemporary Western governments do not even base their policies upon moral relativist reasoning intended to represent a genuine plurality of viewpoints, but rather increasingly upon an agressive 'secularism' which embodies a distinctive morality of its own that a priori excludes the legitimacy of other viewpoints. Thus the 'secular' view that contraception and abortion are legitimate options is made the norm, and the 'religious' view that they are not is merely tolerated, and then only to a certain degree. This 'secularism' is thus an ideology in itself that seeks to exclude and destroy opposing ideologies and as such it is irrational to tout it as a common platform for all of society.)

Obama's Science Czar was (is?) a Eugenics Nut

... because this is absolutely too mind-boggingly awful to prevent commenting on. A "Czar", btw, in American political terminology denotes an executive official in charge of a specific area of public policy. The position is ad hoc and appointed by the government, meaning that unlike other officials such as the Surgeon General a Czar does not have to undergo confirmation by Congress or any other democratically elected organ (save for the President).

The 'Science Czar' is the unofficial title of the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is also Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Thus, he has an important role in determining policy on all matters involving science and technology, including, presumably, research.

Barack Obama's pick for this position is a certain John Holdren, PhD, a physicist who has among other things taught Environmental Policy at Harvard (go figure). This has not prevented him from making a bit of an overstatement regarding global warming, stating that sea levels might rise to as much as 13 feet (the IPCC 4th assessment report on climate change, which is largely viewed as authoritative, predicts 23 inches in its absolute worst-case scenario - it can be accessed here).

But this is not the first instance, nor by far the worst, in which he has seriously overestimated the state of the planet's decline. In 1977, he co-authored a book with Paul R. Ehrlich (author of the influential book The Population Bomb) and his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, named Ecoscience - Population, Resources, Environment. The book adresses the issue of overpopulation, which it sees as an alarming and imminent danger to all of humanity, including the United States itself (on another occasion, he stated that the US would not be able to support a population of 280 million by 2040; as of 2009 the population is well over 300 million and the problem faced by most people in the area of nutrition is not exactly that they have too little food). To counter this danger, the authors argue for the following propositions:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" - in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of the lives of all human persons - using an armed international police force.

Surely this is exaggerated? Nope. The guy who uncovered it all has provided scans of pages in the book at his website. It is absolutely clear that the authors are endorsing these propositions. But it must be out of context then? Well, reading the quotes in context arguably only makes them scarier. Do read the whole thing; it provides quite the insight into the mind of a certain strand of radical Environmentalist Malthusianism which wants to sacrifice human life and liberty to save the environment and ensure decent living standards for all (remaining) people. Did I say radical? No, it really isn't radical at all since the people who espoused it are apparently much respected in the scientific establishment and teach at Harvard.

The program outlined above is eugenics, plain and simple. There is very little difference between this and the eugenics program launched by the Nazis. The Nazis only resorted to direct killing of adult 'undesirables' at a late stage, but in the beginning the program was comprised of much the same elements: involuntary sterilization of 'undesirables' (mentally handicapped and people with hereditary defects) and forced removal of the children they already had. They, too, employed a police force which interfered in intimate details of the lives of all citizens. If anything, Holdren & al.'s program is even more radical than that of the Nazis. Now, the Nazis' motive was racial hygeine, while the motive of Holdren & al. was ensuring decent living standards for all humans on the planet and preventing environmental degradation caused by overpopulation. The latter are worthy aims, to be sure. But does the end justify the means? Those human persons who will have their rights curtailed, forced to being sterilized, abort their children or see them taken away by the authorities are not going to bloody well care about the motives behind these heinous and utterly despicable acts. They are evil no matter what purpose they are intended to serve (i.e., intrinsically evil).

The blogger whom the story originates with has not been able to identify any statement where Holdren distances himself from these views. Granted, the book was written in 1977, so a lot can have happened since then. Yet it still gives me the creeps that a person who has once displayed such profoundly twisted reasoning is now in charge of the scientific and technological policy of the world's only remaining superpower.

And even more, that this fellow was made a Professor of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley - in 1978!

(Brought to my attention by the redoubtable Cube)

Mexico at War

Mexico is under attack - and no, I don't mean by the inaptly named 'swine flu', which is showing itself to be, as we say in Denmark, 'a storm in a glass of water' (according to the latest update from WHO, initial reports of over 150 deaths were widely exaggerated; only 19 deaths, all in Mexico, have been reported so far). I mean by Socialist politicians who have launched a concerted effort to legalize abortion in state legislation.

In 2007, Mexico City legalised abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Since then, pro-abortion groups have been lobbying for similar legislation to be introduced in other states, most recently in Queretaro, where a proposal to legalise abortion after rape was defeated. I know many will object to this. It is indisputable that a rape is a deeply traumatizing experience and that as a man I might never realize the full extent of this. However, I also believe it to be indisputable that any human life which results from such a despicable act is a full member of human society, with all the rights that entails. I also find the argument that a resulting pregnancy is necessarily a further, unbearable trauma unconvincing. It is a well-known fact that there is also a trauma connected to abortion, and it is not inconceivable that the birth of a wonderful child may just be what dispels the awfulness of the situation. Good can come out of evil. Besides, the wording of the text seems to have been extremely ambiguous, allowing for abortion simply on the grounds of a purported rape.

In fact, the efforts to legalise abortion have prompted a backlash from pro-life forces, which have been successful in introducing pro-life amendments to the constitutions of at least seven states. The Mexican Supreme Court, while ruling 8-3 that the Mexico City law was constitutional, split 4-4 on whether the constitution provided a general 'right to abortion' or whether this was up to the decision of states (in the nature of things, the minority from the former ruling did not vote on this issue).

One of these amendments, from the state of Baja California, has been brought before the Supreme Court. The callousness of pro-abortionists never ceases to amaze me. The amendment lays down that "from the moment in which an individual is conceived, he enters under the protection of the law, and is treated as a born person for all corresponding legal effects, until his natural or non-induced death." I can't possibly imagine who could be against affording this most basic right of equality before the law to all human persons, especially those most vulnerable and unable to seek legal assistance. But the Human Rights Commisioner of the state clearly does not want to do that, and cites among his reasons that it impedes the freedom of women to use contraceptives! This is quite astonishing because it represents a rare admittance of the fact that some contraceptives - among them 'the pill' - have abortifacient properties. So this guy is actually saying that we had better accept that human beings are killed in the womb than discontinue the use of such contraceptives! The Cult of the Sacred Orgasm strikes again.

Via LifeSiteNews.

Schoolgirls to Obtain Morning-after Pills by Text Message

I fully understand that people worry about teenage pregnancy. In my opinion, people are not well suited to either have sex or be parents until they have gone through the turbulent years of adolescence and developed a reasonably stable sense of their own identity and an appreciation for the identity and dignity of others. It is even more worrying when very emotionally immature persons, even pre-teens, are having sex - they are being profoundly irresponsible and are doing damage to themselves and to others by not knowing how to set limits for their own behaviour, and in the case of girls they are often exploited by older teens or even grown men.

But how does one discourage this type of behaviour? The Oxfordshire County Council thought it would be a brilliant idea to set up a text message service where school pupils in some of the areas most affected by teenage pregnancies could receive easily accessible medical "support" if they thought they had "taken a risk." According to this article from the Times, the service is primarily directed towards handing out 'morning-after pills' to girls who had had unprotected sex or whose contraception had failed.

Now I, and many others, are asking exactly what good that will do? Apart from the obvious but controversial fact that 'morning-after pills' are usually abortifacient and thus entail the taking of an innocent life, this approach is solely directed towards treating the symptoms of a problem rather than the cause. The service may prevent some teenage pregnancies, but it is very likely that more will result from it since it will be come to seen as a handy 'back-up' plan to contraception, meaning contraception will be taken less seriously - resulting in not only more teenage pregnancies, but also more sexually transmitted diseases!

The rationale for not treating the root of this problem is, as far as I can see, that this would entail an admittance of the fact that the 'cult of orgasm' which is so prevalent in our society and is spreading to ever younger ages, is at some level problematic - that the encouragement of teens and pre-teens to delay sexual relations until they are more mature and responsible, and to develop instead within them the idea that relationships ought to be loving, caring, lasting, and not focused exclusively upon sex would amount to a disqualification of the sexual practices of adults themselves, which are often very far from this ideal. Thus the health and well-being of the next generation is essentially sacrificed in order to protect the care-free lifestyle to which the present one has become addicted.

The fact that there is no parental notification involved also makes this scheme a blatant attack upon the rights (and duties) of parents to be responsible for their children's well-being. It boggles the mind that the article states that "Child protection staff will step in if any girl aged between 11 and 13 uses the service." What of children under 11? Is that an impossible scenario? And, the legal age of consent in Britain is 16, so why set the limit at 13? As if girls aged 14 could not be the victims of exploitative relationships.

(On another note: LifeSiteNews reports that one of the schools involved in the pilot project is a Catholic school, and that the County had unilatererally included it in the project, offering it no option not to participate. Is this what passes for freedom of religion in the West?)

The Legacy of Margaret Sanger to be Fulfilled - Or?

Now it's official (as if we didn't know it): Hillary Clinton has affirmed that one of the stated aims of the Obama administration is to advance so-called 'reproductive rights', including the 'right' to abortion, throughout the world.

The same Hillary Clinton recently expressed her admiration for the founder of what would become the largest perpetrator of abortions in the US, Planned Parenthood, saying she was "in awe" of Margaret Sanger and that "her work is not yet done".

Many Catholic bloggers are going into bouts of frenzy over Margaret Sanger, stating that she was a eugenicist, a racist with ties to the KKK, and whatnot. Actually, I think they are missing a far deeper point about Sanger. I don't know much about her, but if the information about her on Wikipedia is anything to go by, it turns out she was not such a horrible person after all; in fact, she was quite conservative, even for her time. She was not a eugenicist in the most perjorative sense of the word - while encouraging women to be smart about when to get pregnant and with whom, she abhorred the murderous eugenics programs in Nazi Germany. She regarded other races than the white one as intellectually and emotionally inferior, but then such a view was not a rarity in her day. The most horrible thing she advocated was actually birth control, which, although morally reprehensible and sometimes abortifacient, seldom constitutes outright murder. On all other issues regarding sexuality and reproduction she was very much a product of the century in which she was born. She viewed masturbation as gravely disordered behaviour and had great disdain for chronic masturbators. Her rationale for birth control was not to 'liberate' women, as the feminists of the 60's sought to do, but rather to prevent their immature and irrational sexual impulses (which were of course unavoidable) from getting them into trouble. And she actually opposed abortion in all instances on the grounds that it always constituted a taking of a life.

So it seems that Margaret Sanger, godmother of abortionism and hero of the sex-obsessive Left, was herself an avid opponent of abortion and had a rather more negative view of human sexuality than the Catholic Church does today. In embracing the teaching of the Church, Planned Parenthood and Hillary Clinton would ironically be much more true to the ideals of their great hero than they are now, and even develop a more rounded view of human sexuality and the joys which accompany it than she ever attained.

In Condoms We Trust: The Fallacies of the Contraceptive Ideology

Pope Benedict XVI was hugely criticised for his remark on the way to Africa that "this problem of Aids cannot be overcome merely with money, necessary though it is. If there is no human dimension, if Africans do not help, the problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it." From New York to Sydney, Western public opinion pounced on the Holy Father, condemning him and the Catholic Church as "stuck in a mediaeval world view", "liars", and even as "assassins", claiming that the Church's opposition to contraception has caused the death of untold millions because it has exposed them to infection with HIV.

But in the heat of all this, very few have stopped and asked themselves the obvious question: Do condoms lower the risk of HIV transmission? Perhaps people think it's too obvious. Encasing the male genitals in a protective barrier during intercourse must necessarily lower the risk of HIV transmission. And so it does, under ordinary circumstances. But that does not mean that it eliminates this risk, and that is an entirely different issue.

Some controversial writers, including prominent Catholic moralists, have argued that the pores in the material which condoms is made of are so large that a considerable number of virus particles will escape the condom. I went through the research on this a while back. Very little is published on it. Those articles that are available suggest that some leakage of virus particles does indeed occur, but that the amount is for all practical purposes negligible. For HIV infection to occur, it is already necessary that a large number of virus particles are transmitted; thus condoms do actually lower the rate of transmission to levels which are, for all intents and purposes, undetectable. One study suggested that they reduced the risk of transmission from 0.1% (for normal intercourse) to 0.00001%. (Carey et al. Effectiveness of latex condoms as a barrier to human immunodeficiency virus-sized particles under conditions of simulated use. Sex Transm Dis. 1992 Jul-Aug;19(4):230-4.) That is, 1 infection in 10 million intercourses. This figure would be higher for people who engage in homosexual practices, as anal intercourse bears a higher risk of transmission than vaginal.

Seepage of virus particles, thus, does not seem to pose a significant concern as to the effectiveness of condoms. There are other, much more pressing, problems which should be addressed and the issue of seepage is an unfortunate distraction from these:

1. Condoms occasionally break or slip off during withdrawal. Studies apparently show that each occurs about 2% of the time (Warner L, Steiner MJ. Male condoms. In: Hatcher RA, Trussell J, Nelson AL, Cates W, Stewart FH, Kowal D, et al. editor(s). Contraceptive Technology. 19th Edition. New York: Ardent Media, Inc., 2007:297–316.)

2. Condoms are most often not used in long-term relationships. For a long while it was presumed by many in the scientific community that HIV in Africa was first and foremost spread through prostitution and casual sexual intercourse. Recently, some scientists have drawn attention to the fact that very few Africans actually engage in such high-risk behaviour. Rather, it is the norm in many African cultures to be essentially polygamous, with both men and women having multiple concurrent long-term partners. This pattern is much more inducive to HIV transmission than either casual sexual encounters or serial monogamy. (Epstein, BMJ 2008;337:a2638)

3. It seems that reliance on condoms may encourage a phenomenon known as risk compensation. Sunbathers who spend more time than usual in the sun after applying sunscreen is an example of this. In other words, condoms make people over-confident and causes them to engage in even more risk-seeking behaviour than they otherwise would have, thus offsetting any positive effect condom use by itself produces.

While I have not been able to find any positive scientific evidence for this last point, it is touted by senior Harvard research scientist Dr. Edward Green as a fitting explanation for the fact that there is actually no scientific evidence that increased use of condoms causes a reduction in HIV transmission rates. Green has given an interview to Catholic News Agency, in which he states that although he is a Liberal and is not ideologically opposed to contraception, he agrees with the Pope's statements as they are supported by science. The interview is quite enlightening. Among other things, Dr. Green, who is the director of Harvard University's AIDS prevention project, draws attention to the fact that Uganda early on produced a dramatic reduction in HIV incidence by developing home-grown programs focusing on promoting faithful monogamy. In 2004, after Western 'advisers' had successfully lobbied for greater access to condoms, the incidence rates rose again.

Dr. Green is also of the impression that many organisations combating HIV espouse a false and somewhat racist ideology according to which behaviour change is impossible, especially as regards Africans, and that the only viable option is risk reduction.

A final point: as Dr. Green notes, "anyone who worked in family planning knew that if you needed to prevent a pregnancy, say the woman will die, you don’t recommend a condom.". The chance per intercourse of becoming pregnant is admittedly somewhat higher than the risk of HIV transmission, but still: scientific evidence suggests that condom use only lowers the chance of pregnancy about 85% (Trussell J. Contraceptive efficacy. In: Hatcher RA, Trussell J, Nelson AL, Cates W, Stewart FH, Kowal D, et al. editor(s). Contraceptive Technology. 19th Edition. New York: Ardent Media, Inc., 2007:747–826.) It is clear from this that condoms are far from being a fool-proof device against pregnancy, so how can one expect it to be so against HIV transmission? One review conducted in 1994 even concludes that the risk of HIV transmission is only lowered 69%! (Weller 1993)

In conclusion: used consistently and properly, condoms may lower the risk of HIV transmission somewhat, but they in no way eliminate that risk. They may even encourage risk-seeking behaviour which offsets these gains. Condoms have shown to effectively lower the risk of HIV transmission in sub-populations which are already engaging in high-risk behaviour (such as prostitutes), but not on a larger population level. Given the grave consequences of HIV infection it really is imperative to eliminate the risk of transmission entirely, and condoms can not effect this. Even in the case of married couples where one is infected and the other not (serodiscordant), it is gravely irresponsible to have sex using condoms as the risks are simply too great. Not only the risk of HIV transmission, but also the chance of producing a pregnancy where the child would risk being infected with HIV upon birth if the mother is HIV positive. The Church's opposition to contraception is of course not based on its inefficiency in combating HIV/AIDS, but on the fact that it distorts human sexuality. Nevertheless, even apart from this, the Church is absolutely justified in promoting abstinence outside marriage (and in the case of serodiscordant couples) and fidelity within marriage as the only viable method currently available to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS - both for individuals and populations.

In other words, to quote Dr. Green: "The Pope is right." As usual.

Some additional reading:

• Hearst N, Chen S. Condom promotion for AIDS prevention in the developing world: is it working? Stud Fam Plann 2004 Mar;35(1):39-47
• Kajubi et al. Increasing condom use without reducing HIV risk: results of a controlled community trial in Uganda. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 2005 Sep 1;40(1):77-82