Stop with the dogma!

PARIS — For the secular French state, an attack by the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy comes close to a declaration of war.

For two decades, the country’s Muscular Dystrophy Association has run a wildly popular annual telethon to raise money for medical research. (Remember, these are the people who idolize Jerry Lewis!)

This year, the Roman Catholic Church here has sullied the reputation of the telethon, with some church officials calling its financing of research on embryonic stem cells immoral.

“For us, these embryos are not things, but human beings,” Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, told journalists on Tuesday.
“And from the depths of our faith, we cannot accept that they are selected, destroyed and the objects of experiments.”

France, like some other European Union countries, allows limited research using embryonic stem cells. Britain and Belgium are more permissive; Germany and Italy have stricter regulations. But the separation of church and state is an unshakable pillar of the French Republic, and these attacks have been met with sharp resistance.

Government officials and the leaders of the French medical establishment have made clear that the church has no business interfering in matters of state, especially when they involve a practice that is legal.

“It’s not up to the church to put any pressure on families who have recourse to genetic diagnoses, and even less to make the totality of donors feel guilty,” said Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Évry, the suburb of Paris where the Muscular Dystrophy Association is based.

Even President Jacques Chirac entered the fray, staunchly defending the telethon and upholding a 2004 bioethics law that permits stem cell research, with prior parental approval, on embryos that would have been destroyed.

The Catholic Church has consistently opposed research on embryonic stem cells, but the current verbal assault by church leaders is exceptional in republican France.

Speaking from personal experience, I have a wife who is waiting for stem cell research to help with a cure for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

I also have a step-son who is waiting for stem cell research to help with his kidney transplant. This, so that he does not need to be on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life and does not face the possibility of another transplant operation later on.
So don’t tell me this research is immoral.
The church's opposition to it is!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html