James' comments today were strangely well-timed. I was just getting ready to post a closely related article on the subject of Bush, god, creationism, the anti-cloning movement, and the generally anti-scientific stance of the current administration. The entire article is very interesting; I'll give one excerpt on cloning and Leon Kass, chairman of the administration's "Council on Bioethics":

The Bush presidency was in its infancy when Rove identified cloning as a topic that needed to be tackled. The administration's contempt for the issue was made transparent when he suggested introducing a bill into Congress that would ban all forms of cloning. Kass readily agreed: "We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings," he has written, "not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear." [The Guardian]

"Things" that we hold dear, he says. We are "repelled" by the concept of human cloning. I need to look up more of Kass's arguments. I believe Dave Dick was telling me that Kass upholds "repulsion" as a basic criterion in making ethical determinations. Here's to undoing every last bit of more than 2000 years of philosophical reasoning about ethics.