Free Republic

Today’s topic is a tad delicate, so let’s back into it gently. Last Sunday I found the Emmy Awards in progress in the living room, and sat down to take a look. I was mildly pleased to find them moving along more briskly than in days of yore, and mildly amused at the Bob Newhart subplot (for most of you who were not watching, he was supposedly imprisoned in a Plexiglas cube with only three hours’ worth of air to encourage winners to keep their acceptance speeches short). I found the Dick Clark retrospective mildly touching, and the Aaron Spelling...

Childbirth: Flawed Babies Need Not Apply Members of the secular scientific community take their moral and intellectual purity seriously, as we have seen from the continuing debate on Intelligent Design. Vested in white lab coats, they appear as high priests of the god of Reason, they defend their model of intractably theistic Darwinism. It would be easier to accept the priestly purity of the scientific caste, however, if its members didn't routinely descend from high-mindedness in decisions clearly made mostly to please the customer. Take, for instance, recent activities in the world of pre- natal screening, where separate articles (in...