THOUGHTFULLY DRIVING THE PORCELAIN BUS

A Column by John S Schroeder

Author's Note (11/1/02): Activities related to remodeling my house dictate that I do not have time to write a column this week. If all goes well, I will return 11/9 -- see you then.

October 26, 2002

Everybody loves to talk about how complicated life is now. When they do they are usually referring to technology -- they can’t program the VCR, their refrigerator is smarter than they are - things like that. Such people usually comment that the old refrigerator was good enough and there is nothing worth taping on TV anyway. "Why when I was a boy I listened to basketball on radio and it was good enough for me. I didn't need no 50" super color twelve remote control complicated P.O.S." Being the techno-weenie I am I do not share the sentiment that technology makes life complicated, but I do think life is too complicated in the current age.

Take, for example, the question of what constitutes a family. In the modern era we have blended families, extended families, work families, same-sex partner families. We have kids that live one week in one house with dad and the girlfriend and the next week in a different house with mom and the girlfriend. We have daughters suing their mothers for custody of the children that the mother carried as a surrogate. We have sperm donors suing for visitation rights with children born to women they never met. Oh, and let's not forget children that flat out have no dad.

Now, technology has made some of these complications possible, but they are also made possible by a moral decline. There are two trends and one consequence of those trends that can readily be seen in the preceding paragraph. The first trend is moral decline; many of the complications listed result from things that were a generation or two ago simply considered taboo, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, and divorce. The second trend that one sees in these circumstances is a reliance on courts to make what are essentially moral decisions. Let me put it to you this way -- divorce has always been legally possible, it is just the dissolution of a contract. What prevented divorce in the past were the common moral convictions of society.

When a court makes a decision, it needs something to guide its reasoning. Now, in an age with declining morality, or at least a common morality, what can a court use to guide its reasoning? Well, typically it uses science. And now we come to see where the complications not covered in the broad brushstrokes above are rooted. Absent morality, science dictates that genetics determine who parents a child. I think everybody knows a horror story in this area.

Do you remember those ethics exercises back in school? The teacher used to posit some question like, "If a baby is born to a women as the result of a rape, should the rapist be allowed parental privileges?" I would always declare the question repugnant and answer, "Hell no." In college I would be laughed at, and in high school I would then be the object of teacherly scorn and he, or more typically she, began to further define circumstances trying to make me see that it could not possibly be that simple a question. All these many years later I would still give the same answer.

Here's the deal; it is only absent a moral sense that such a question is complicated. Morality would dictate that despite having carried a child for nine months a surrogate has no parental rights because she gave her word she would give the child to someone else. Morality would dictate that even if you are homosexual, it is probably a good idea to keep that fact hidden from your children until they are well past the age of sexual development because it just confuses the hell out of them. (Actually morality would say if you are gay, get over it, but I am trying to compromise here.) Morality would dictate that if you knock a girl up, you marry her and make it right. (Actually morality says you wouldn’t be sleeping with her to begin with.) See these complications are pretty simple if one has a moral code.

"Well," you might argue, "you are referring to the traditional moral code, aren’t we allowed to change it?" Ah -- now we get tot he heart of the matter. I think the previous discussion points out that a changeable moral code is essentially no moral code at all. There is only one way to make a moral code that works, and that is to have it enforceable. As we have shown, courts can’t do that. Religion is the only tool by which a moral code can be enforced. And now, you see why I think the church needs to buck societal trends, not kow-tow to them. In the end, the church is the only thing that stands between chaos and us.

But I have griped about the church a lot -- let's talk about technology. As we have shown, a lack of morality does make it very difficult to cope with technology. Until such time as the church has gotten its act worked out, I do think it is reasonable to put some limits on technology and its uses. That is difficult for me to say, given my affection for technology, but absent a moral code I think there are some places we just should not go.

I am not advocating tearing down the technological development infrastructure that really pumps our economy; I am just talking about certain areas that can lead to moral complications. The current front burner issue is human cloning. Of course, we should not do it! Start thinking about the moral implications -- is the clone a person or a pet? Is the clone to be grown simply for harvesting body parts? Doesn’t that violate its basic human rights? Is it a human? This makes abortion look morally simple. No, this is somewhere we just should not go.

I think it is fair to say that most reproductive technology is probably off limits -- even those now currently accepted. In-vitro virtually requires an abortion, or a litter. Surrogacy and sperm donation raise all sorts of parental rights issues.

Here's the bottom line. We have reached the point in our technological development that we can do some very god-like things. That makes it all the more important that we truly understand who we are in relationship to the actual God. Until we do, let's not go there.

With Love,