Stem cells are stem cells, not embryos

Are totipotent cells really embryos?

by Michael Cook | 14 Mar 2014 |

Major developments in stem cell science tend to revive scruples about whether the new pluripotent cell is or could become an embryo. This happened with embryonic stem cells, with Yamanaka’s induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and now with stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells. Unhappily, a cloud hangs over STAP cells because it appears that the original paper in Nature was peppered with mistakes. But the question remains: if scientists create cells which can develop into any cell in the body (and into the placenta as well), are they not what we would otherwise call embryos?

Maureen Condic, of the University of Utah, a redoubtable opponent of human embryonic stem cell research, debunks this idea in the journal Stem Cells and Development: stem cells, she insists, are not embryos.

The problem begins with terminology, she says. The National Institutes of Health defines “totipotent” in two different ways: “capable of developing into a complete organism” or “differentiating into any of its cells or tissues”. The first kind of totipotency is an embryo; the second is a stem cell.

The difference between these two definitions is not trivial. Producing a mature organism requires the ability to both generate all the cells of the body and to organize them in a specific temporal and spatial sequence, that is, to undergo a coordinated process of development. Totipotency in this strict sense is demonstrated by the ability of an isolated cell to produce a fertile, adult individual. Consequently, a cell that is totipotent is also a one-cell embryo; that is, a cell that is capable of generating a globally coordinated developmental sequence.

Only the fate of an organism which is capable of developing into an adult is ethically controversial.

Rather, ethical consideration is given to human embryos based on the status they already possess; that is, their unique and fully operative ability to function as a human organism. Therefore, ethical controversy regarding totipotent human cells only concerns cells that are totipotent in the strict, organismal sense; that is, a cell that is a human embryo.
Condic suggests that the term “totipotent” should be confined to organisms, ie, embryos. She coins the term “plenipotent” for cells which are capable of developing into all cells in the body.

What accounts for the difference? Condic explains that research shows that factors in the cytoplasm of the egg are necesssary for the existence of true totipotency. “At this time, the only known totipotent cytoplasm is produced by an oocyte and contributed to the embryo at fertilization. The fact that oocytes produce the cytoplasmic factors that are required for an embryo to be totipotent is the reason oocytes are used for cloning.” Without these factors, a “plenipotent” cell can never become an embryo.

Language matters. If people do not grasp the difference, they can create artificial controversies “over areas of research that are ethically unproblematic”, Condic writes.

Note: the article in Stem Cells and Development is behind a pay wall. Dr Condic has summarised her paper in Public Discourse, which is readily available.

This article is published by Michael Cook and BioEdge.org under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact Bioedge for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

The Dutch Solution to Parents' Suffering: Kill Their Newborns

Put disabled babies out of our misery, say Dutch doctors

by Michael Cook | 14 Jun 2013 | 

Distress felt by parents of a dying newborn can justify the child’s euthanasia, says Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG), which represents doctors in the Netherlands.

In a new policy document, “Medical decisions about the lives of newborns with severe abnormalities” (in Dutch only) the KNMG explains why it is acceptable, and perhaps even necessary, to euthanase children. This is no longer headline news in the Netherlands, as newborn euthanasia is allowed under the so-called Groningen Protocol, drafted by Dr Eduard Verhagen in 2004. 

The stunning novelty of this statement is that it says that the parents’ suffering may be a reason to kill the newborn. Amongst other conditions, the policy states that a lethal injection of muscle relaxant is ethically possible when “The period of gasping and dying persists and the inevitable death is prolonged, in spite of good preparation, and it causes severe suffering for the parents.”

Dr Verhagen, one of the authors of the KNMG report, explained to Volkskrant, a leading Dutch newspaper, why parental anguish is relevant. "These children are gray and cold, they get blue lips and suddenly every few minutes they take extremely deep breaths. That's very nasty to see, and it can go on for hours and sometimes days."

The experience is extremely stressful for parents. The sight of a child shuddering in its last moments could scar them for ever. However, even Dr Verhagen admits that the child may not actually be suffering. It may feel pain and discomfort, but suffering is complex social and psychological phenomenon without scientifically validated criteria.
What is more objective is the suffering of the parents who witness the child’s distress. Doctors should spare parents the “abomination” of seeing their child die in distress, argues Dr Verhagen. It is part of good palliative care.

The criteria for euthanasing newborns are as follows (from page 54 of the report): if the child is suffering, if it cannot express its own wishes, if death is inevitable and if the dying process is prolonged, then the child may be euthanased and spare the parents further severe suffering.

Of the 175,000 babies born every year in The Netherlands, the KNMG suggests that about 650 might be cases which would be worthy of euthanasia.

“These babies, despite very intensive treatment, will certainly die in the short term. They have a poor prognosis and a very bleak life perspective. They may not be dependent on intensive care but they face a life of serious and hopeless suffering. Doctors and parents face the exceedingly profound question of whether to start or continue treatment or even whether a good action may actually be a harm, in view of the suffering and disability that may result from the poor health of the child.” 

This article is published by Michael Cook and BioEdge.org under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

Michael Cook asks, "What will happen when the same principle is applied to the elderly? Will the tears of their middle-aged children decide whether they live or die?"

Why "Merry Christmas" beats "Season's Greetings"

I like this article by Michael Cook from a year ago so much that I am posting it again, this time before Christmas!

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 20 December 2011

7 reasons why “Merry Christmas” will always beat “Season’s Greetings”

DON’T LET GRINCHES STEAL YOUR CHRISTMAS BY SUBSTITUTING MEANINGLESS SLOGANS.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Christmas had never happened and that the Roman Emperor Aurelian had succeeded in establishing the feast of Sol Invictus on December 25 back in the year 274 AD.

Instead of Christmas, we would have had the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. At this time of year, just after the winter solstice, the lantern beaming light and heat hangs low in the sky; the days are dark and cold. But day by day it climbs back, infallibly reaching its fiery zenith at the summer solstice six months later. Yay! Way to go! This god has won more rounds than Manny Pacquiao! 

Had this happened, the colourless salutation “Season’s Greetings” might have conveyed something vaguely meaningful, especially if you’re shivering in the northern hemisphere. Something like: gor blimey, I can’t handle this brass monkey weather, but let’s hang in there and may the gods grant us a good harvest.”

It’s a hopeful sentiment, but not an inspiring one, a bit like the experience of eating tofu and celery sticks for Christmas dinner instead of tucking into mince pies and roast turkey. The sun rises and the sun sets; seasons come and seasons go. Whatever good or evil men do, the sun shines on them all alike with a divine indifference. For devotees of Sol Invictus, “Season’s Greetings” would have been a token of our inevitable submission to fate. This was the popular wisdom of the ancient world – from which Christmas has rescued us.

Whether or not you accept the Christian theological beliefs which underpin the celebration of Christmas, they have transformed Western society and they are in the process of transforming nations far from Bethlehem. Christmas, that is, the celebration of the moment in which the all-powerful creator of the Universe took on human flesh and entered human history, sends powerful, if unspoken, messages. Here are seven which are implicitly conveyed when we wish friends a “Merry Christmas”.

God cares. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport.” This comes from King Lear, but it is the wisdom of paganism. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. What the Incarnation, as the theologians call the act of God becoming man, shows for all time is that the Creator cares about his creatures. As the carol says, “and he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness.” Jupiter, on the other hand, when presented with complaints about our sadness would probably say something like, “Yeah, whatever. Get over it. Stuff happens, you know.”

History matters. The ancients believed in the myth of the eternal recurrence, that history was not linear, but cyclic. Their cosmic fate was to live imprisoned in cycles which end in fire and then return in a new cycle, playing the same role over and over again. Its symbol is the dragon devouring its tail. But the implication of the Incarnation is that history is moving towards a climax which begins at Bethlehem. Our own participation in history makes a difference.

All men are fundamentally equal. We can get used to Christmas paintings of the manger, in which shepherds are rubbing shoulders with the Magi as they peer over Joseph’s shoulder. But the implications of this setting are immense. “With the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth our Saviour holy”: before the infant in the lowly cattle shed, distinctions of talent, rank and education are insignificant. All men are brothers.

Families are the cornerstone of society. Bethlehem suggested the ideal to which Christian families should aspire: a father and mother doting on their child, willing to make any sacrifice for his welfare. But the homely tenderness of this scene was virtually unknown in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans were not strangers to domestic affection, but this was not the paradigm of their families. Without Christmas we would never have had the bubbly, loving warmth of the Cratchit family made famous in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Women have dignity. No women appear in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. There are famous women in ancient history, but most of them are queens and empresses like Cleopatra and Zenobia. In Bethlehem, a simple village girl, Mary, is the central figure. Kings bow in homage to her and her child. In the Christian tradition, capacity for motherhood gives women an incomparable dignity. As Cristina Rossetti’s marvellous poem (and carol) says,

Angels and archangels
  May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
  Thronged the air,
But only His mother
  In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
  With a kiss.

Children are special. The ancient world defined children by their powerlessness; they were just underdeveloped adults. But Bethlehem suggests that we should treasure their innocence and dependence. “Once in Royal David’s City” is a Victorian carol, but it expresses it nicely:

For he is our childhood's pattern,
day by day like us he grew;
he was little, weak and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew.

The fact that a defenceless child is the centre of the Christmas story also means that men and women are not to be valued by how productive they are, but simply because they are with us and share in a common nature. In the Gospel account this is underscored by the sequel to the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents by the vicious tyrant Herod.

We should send more Christmas cards. Western art was born on Christmas Day. We take for granted the human drama depicted on Christmas cards. But in other cultures, art was meant to be a faint reflection of unchanging, inalterable divinity. That’s why statues of Buddha depict him in a few stylised postures. Even Greek and Roman art presented idealised figures and seldom depicted ordinary life.

But art of the Christian era is based upon an altogether different philosophy: that all of human life has dignity because the Child of Bethlehem is both God and Man. Since then, everything in human life carries within it a spark of divinity and becomes a worthy subject for an artist. What sort of greeting cards would we have if the cult of Sol Invictus had survived? Probably much like we have now: images of snow-bound homes or decorative calligraphy. But nothing human, affectionate and tender.

So there you have seven reasons to say “Merry Christmas” with greater gusto in 2011. Let’s defy miserabilist Grinches who want to banish it from public life.

In any case, all this has happened before. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in England. In the 1640s the Long Parliament decreed that no holy days other than Sundays were to be celebrated. December 25 was to be observed with fasting and humiliation for the sins of countrymen who had turned the day into a feast, sinfully “giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”. Shops and market were to be kept open for trading. Parliament was to meet for business on December 25. Christmas, said the Puritans, was a pestilent popish festival with no Biblical justification.

However, Cromwell failed to convert Merrie England to miserabilism. As soon as Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the Christmas bans were swept away. Mirth, mistletoe and plum pudding returned and the Christmas fast vanished. The reason for the season was no longer treason. Merry Christmas and "God bless us every one!"

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 

This article is published by Michael Cook and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines.

Science, Ethics, and a Nobel Prize

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 9 October 2012

A Nobel Prize for ethics?

This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine was shared by a Briton and a Japanese who respects the dignity of the human embryo.

Two stem cell researchers have shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2012, an elderly Briton, Sir John B. Gurdon, and a younger Japanese, Shinya Yamanaka. By a serendipitous coincidence, Sir John made his discovery in 1962 -- the year of Yamanaka's birth.

Fifty years of stem cell research have brought cures for intractable diseases within reach but they have also generated firestorms of controversy. Between 2001 and 2008, stem cell research vied with climate change as the most contentious issue in science. But since then, the firestorm died down -- basically because of Yamanaka’s achievements. In fact, Tom Douglas, of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at Oxford University, describes Yamanaka's work as “a rare example of a scientific discovery that may solve more ethical problems than it creates".

So what happened in these 50 years? (Click here for a graphic explanation from the Nobel Committee.)

In his classic experiment at the University of Cambridge, Sir John discovered that cell development is reversible. The conventional wisdom was that cells could never change once they had specialized as nerve, skin, or muscle cells. He proved that this was wrong by replacing the nucleus of a frog egg cell with a nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. This modified cell developed into a normal tadpole.

This astonishing development eventually led to the cloning of the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996 and subsequent attempts by rogue scientists to clone human beings.

But while the technique clearly worked, no one really understood how cell development worked. The obvious target for research was the embryo. From this ball of undifferentiated cells come each of the body's specialized cells -- more than 200 of them in humans. Surely the answer must lie there. In 1998 an American scientist, James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isolated and cultivated human embryonic stem cells.  

But a one-eyed focus on embryos left stem cell science hostage to ethics. Despite scientists’ bravado, everyone had some qualms about destroying embryos for their stem cells. Even Thomson admitted to the New York Times that "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough”.

Still, it seemed the only way forward. Desperate patient advocates, backed by a supporting chorus of bioethicists, scientists and doctors, argued tearfully that the possibility of miracle cures had to trump ethics.

But, in 2006, there came astonishing news from the University of Kyoto. An orthopaedic surgeon turned stem cell scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, had discovered that skin cells from mature mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. It was an amazingly imaginative step. Instead of mimicking natural development from embryo to adult, why not wind back the clock from adult to embryo?

Yamanaka found that by introducing only a few genes, specialized skin cells could become pluripotent stem cells, i.e. immature cells that can develop into all types of cells in the body. Until then, creating pluripotent cells without resorting to cloning seemed unlikely. Like Gurdon, for whom he has an immense respect, Yamanaka had skittled the conventional wisdom.

This was electrifying news for biologists. It was as if commuters on the pot-holed, terrorist-infested road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone could suddenly detour down a six-lane autobahn at 200km. Many famous scientists dropped human embryonic stem cells and began work on what Yamanaka had termed "induced pluripotent stem cells". A year later, in November 2007, both he and James Thomson, in separate papers, confirmed that human cells could also be reprogrammed. 

The rest is history.

As the Nobel Committee says about Gurdon and Yamanaka's research, "Textbooks have been rewritten and new research fields have been established. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy."

What turned Yamanaka away from the group-think which goaded his colleagues into the swamp of human embryonic stem cell research? Nowadays, the feverish excitement over human embryonic stem cells in the early Noughties seems ridiculous. Leading scientific and medical journals launched a crusade of Enlightenment heroes against prejudiced troglodytes. In one memorable endorsement of embryo research, the New England Journal of Medicine  -- the world's leading medical journal -- published an editorial which concluded with this cringeworthy hyperbole: "The Promethean prospect of eternal regeneration awaits us, while time's vulture looks on." It never mentioned cell reprogramming.

Yamanaka's originality may have sprung from his ethical sensitivities. Even Julian Savulescu, the director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who has no objections to embryo research, recognises this. "Yamanaka has taken people’s ethical concerns seriously about embryo research and modified the trajectory of research into a path that is acceptable for all. 

He deserves not only a Nobel Prize for Medicine, but a Nobel Prize for Ethics."

In an interview with the New York Times in 2007, Yamanaka remembered one day years before when he paid a social visit to a friend's IVF clinic. There, he peered through a microscope. "When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realised there was such a small difference between it and my daughters," said the father of two. "I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way."

Nor does he believe that scientists should put progress above ethics. In another 2007 interview, with New Scientist, he spoke about the firestorms. "These are very difficult decisions, and I think that society should make them," he said. "It should not be scientists. They can find it difficult to think like the person on the street, and instead may see it simply as a good opportunity. We scientists can be involved in the decision-making process, but I think unless society is comfortable with the therapy it should not go ahead."

Once again, experience shows that that ethical science is good science.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

This article is published by Michael Cook and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact them for permission and fees.

Church, State, and Marriage in the UK

Paul Adams

The previous post by Michael Cook on an important legal opinion about the impact of the UK Government's planned redefinition of marriage raises some interesting questions.

The Church, like English and American common law as I understand it and the Natural Law, regards marriage as one of those God-given institutions that precedes the state and does not depend on the state for its definition or permission to exist.  For the Catholic Church and the Orthodox, it is a sacrament like baptism and the Eucharist.  The Church could not simply stop celebrating this sacrament any more than any other as a way of avoiding legal action or persecution.  The state could, of course, refuse to recognize, for civil and legal purposes, marriages celebrated in church before a priest, though such a move (like SSM itself) would not be politically popular.

Such a cutting off of civil from religious marriage would be more complicated for the Church of England because the state controls the Church and imposes laws on it about such things as whom it must marry.  It is not clear that the C of E would have a legal basis, though there is certainly a theological and ecclesial one, for refusing to marry two people of the same sex.  The two would be physically incapable of consummating their "marriage," of course.  There could be no one-flesh union in a conjugal act that was open to new life.  Any children the pair acquired would not and could not be the result of such a union and necessarily would grow up without at least one of his or her natural parents.  But if the state insists than such an intrinsically barren union must be celebrated as a marriage, how can the state's church refuse?  Woolly and accommodationist to secularism and the sexual revolution as the C of E (and even more its American partners) may be, it seems there must be a point where the body must heed the anti-totalitarian principle enunciated by Christ himself, to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.

If the state imposes its own secularist and anti-Christian sexual morality on the Catholic Church, the Church must and will resist, no matter the cost in terms of persecution.  Serious Christians as well as Orthodox Jews and Muslims doubtless will do likewise.  The C of E is more problematic.  A product of the state against the universal Church from the start, it seems to be approaching a point where it can no longer plausibly claim to be both Christian and the state church, with the monarch as its head on earth.  Disestablishment may not save the C of E from the persecution that faces the rest of us but it might enable it to maintain some integrity in the process.

How Does It Harm You? Let Me Count the Ways

Could British teachers be sacked for opposing gay marriage? Probably, says QC

Michael Cook | 11 Sep 2012 |  

Teachers and chaplains who openly oppose the UK Government's redefinition of marriage face being disciplined, or sacked for their views if the law is changed, warns a top legal expert. The detailed legal opinion from Aidan O'Neill, a senior QC and expert on civil liberties and human rights, commissioned by the Coalition for Marriage, concludes that legalising gay marriage will affect the lives of millions of ordinary people.

Mr O'Neill warns that the plans to tear up the centuries-old definition of marriage will have far-reaching consequences, affecting schools, foster caring, adoption, the use of public buildings and even the careers of individuals. In the most alarming section of his assessment, he warns that teachers and chaplains who work in hospitals, or even the armed forces, could face being sacked under equalities legislation.

Asked about the effect of redefining marriage on schools, Mr O'Neill writes that if gay marriage became law in England and Wales, a school would be within its legal rights to dismiss a teacher if he, or she, refused to use material in the classroom that endorses gay marriage. This would include a teacher refusing, on the grounds of religious or philosophical conscience, to use a storybook about gay marriage called "King and King".

He also warns that parents who object to gay marriage being taught to their children across the curriculum will have no right to withdraw their child from lessons they disapprove of, for reasons of conscience.

Mr O'Neill also warned that Government promises to protect marriage celebrants, who object to the current definition of marriage being rewritten, are meaningless.

Asked if those conducting religious marriage ceremonies could be taken to court for refusing to carry out a gay wedding, Mr O'Neill replies "Yes". The QC, based at Matrix Chambers, states:

"If marriage is opened to allow two individuals, regardless of their gender or sex, to marry one another, then Article 12 ECHR will apply both to same sex and opposite sex marriage. Any attempt in law, then, to differentiate between same sex and opposite sex marriage would in principle be covered by the non-discrimination provisions of Article 14 ECHR and any differentiation in treatment between opposite sex and same sex marriage would be subject to particularly strict scrutiny by the Strasbourg Court and the offending State would have to show particularly convincing and weighty reasons to justify any such a difference in treatment."

And in a strongly worded section Mr O'Neill says that churches would be in a stronger legal position if they were to stop conducting weddings, bring to an end more than a thousand years of tradition.

"Churches might indeed better protect themselves against the possibility of any such litigation by deciding not to provide marriage services at all, since there could be no complaint then of discrimination in their provision of services as between same sex and opposite sex couples."

Controversially, Mr O'Neill also says that the Church of England would be in a stronger position to fight equality laws if it were 'disestablished'.

"And, in principle, the Church of England might be better protected under any such claim if it were disestablished in the sense that its clergy were no longer placed under formal legal obligations by the general law to solemnise the marriages of all and any person otherwise eligible to marry under the general law, since then it would be more able to claim the protection of Article 9 ECHR and the principle of religious liberty as against the requirements of the State rather than as present where, at least in matters of the solemnisation of marriage, the position of the established church appears closer to being an arm or department of the State."

The strength and clarity of the advice from Mr O'Neill, who has a strong track record of supporting gay rights, will shock many on both sides of the debate and reignite calls for the Government to publish its own legal advice.

Leaked communications between the Scottish law officers and their English counterparts have already highlighted concerns that Alex Salmond's administration has about the inability of the Scottish courts to protect clergy from legal challenge. Dr Sharon James, an expert on family policy and a Coalition for Marriage (C4M) spokesperson, described the legal picture as "a disaster waiting to happen" and a "lawyers' charter".

"Looking at the effect this change will have on children and parents, taking absolute control of a child's education from a parent and handing it to a local authority is an unprecedented assault on the rights of parents. This is a dangerous path to go down and one that should be resisted. Redefining marriage would also demand that social workers ask prospective foster carer applicants if they support the new definition - and could halt their application if they do not. Supporting civil partnerships, but not gay marriage, would almost certainly fail the equality and discrimination policies, and could prevent an individual from becoming a foster parent."

The legal advice from Mr O'Neill also says that problems could also arise if a church decided to hire a council-owned community centre each week for a youth club. If the church's website stated that it will only conduct opposite-sex marriages, the council would be within its legal rights to stop the church from hiring the community centre, as it would breach equality laws. Dr Sharon James continued:

"Mr O'Neill's expert summary is incontrovertible proof that legalising gay marriage is not only a legislative minefield but an unparalleled attack on the freedom of conscience Britons have under the law. The redefinition of marriage would ride roughshod over a person's right to support marriage as the exclusive union between one man and one woman, whether that person be a teacher, a parent, a foster carer or a marriage registrar.

"The only winners from a change in marriage law will be lawyers, who will make a fortune out of what would rapidly become a legal mess of untold proportions. I hope the irony is not lost on the Government that their misguided campaign to legalise gay marriage would create a society with fewer freedoms than before."

First published by Michael Cook and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons license on the Conjugality blog.  

Obama's Kulturkampf in Light of Bismarck's

The Obama Administration's "war" (as HHS Secretary Sebelius calls it) against the Catholic Church has a precedent in the struggle of Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Church in Germany.  The differences are clear, but there are similarities.  

One not mentioned here is the talk of setting up a rival American Catholic Church, analogous to the Old Catholic Church supported by the state in Bismarck's Germany.  Such a schismatic organization, if it materialized, would have money and the support, direct or indirect, of the liberal media, some (many?) leading liberal Catholics of the National Catholic Reporter-Georgetown-Boston College stripe, and the Obama Administration.  The Catholic Church, whether by fines (oops, taxes), court rulings, or diocesan measures to conserve what was left of its assets by closing charities, hospitals, schools, and colleges, would lose much of its property and its religious obligation to serve and educate, regardless of the faith of the sick, children, prisoners, the homeless, and the poor would be crippled.  All this happened in Bismarck's Germany.

But as Cook notes, repression, far from crippling the Church, united it.

Bismarck lost his Kulturkampf.  But the struggle to subordinate the Church and all else to the German State did not disappear.  It took a more sinister and terrible form in the next century.  READ ON!

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 3 July 2012

A Kulturkampf primer

The best-known culture war was fought in 19th Century Germany, pitting Prussia's Iron Chancellor against the Catholic Church. The Iron Chancellor lost.

Now that the Affordable Care Act has survived its Supreme Court challenge, there comes the fight over its implementation. Moral considerations rank high on the list of casus belli for Catholics and other religious groups. They fear that the Act will force them to pay for procedures which they abhor, like the morning-after pill, abortion, and sterilisation. The price of resistance could be “institutional martyrdom”, according to University of Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley.

He is not alone in his forebodings. The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, has said that “The long-term effect is that the Catholic Church will be stripped of the institutions that are her instruments for public service. We will lose hospitals, we will lose universities.”

Is their alarm justified? Or is all this just huffing and puffing by embittered losers? Only time will tell, but there are precedents for a war between the Catholic Church and a democratic government. The paradigm case is the Kulturkampf – the culture war – waged by the Iron Chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, in the 1870s. The differences are obvious -- President Obama does not make a habit of wearing spiked Prussian helmets -- but there are thought-provoking parallels as well.

Throughout the 19th century Church and State were often at loggerheads, even in European countries with centuries of Catholic tradition behind them. Enlightenment progressives everywhere favoured a radically secularised society in which religion played only a marginal role. In Prussia, the forerunner state to modern Germany, this problem burst a gasket in 1871.

Bismarck’s life’s work was the unification, through conquest and treaty, of an archipelago of German-speaking states (with the conspicuous exception of Austria). In 1870 Prussia humiliated France in the Franco-German War. Bismarck’s army took Emperor Napoleon III prisoner and starved Paris into submission. The Prussians did a triumphal march through the streets of Paris. Bismarck was on a roll. In 1871 the hold-out states of southern Germany joined a Prussian-led federation with Kaiser Wilhelm I as head of state. In many ways this prosperous new country was authoritarian, but it was also a democracy with active political parties.

Even in the flush of triumph, however, the master politician saw problems ahead. As Prussia expanded and became Germany, it lost its original character – a highly-centralised, largely Protestant state. Catholics – mostly in the Rhineland, southern Germany and in the Polish-speaking East – now constituted about a third of the new nation. Bismarck believed that he needed to press hard for unity of language, religion and education, drawing all of society under government control.

In this, he was supported by liberals who detested the Catholic Church as the archetypal foe of progress. It was the famous scientist and social reformer Rudolph Virchow who gave Bismarck’s “reforms” the name Kulturkampf. He praised them as “a great struggle in the interest of humanity" which would eliminate medieval traditionalism, obscurantism, and authoritarianism.

The flavour of the times can be tasted in these words from a Prussian politician in 1875. To “enthusiastic cheers”, he said: “Gentlemen, anyone who believes in our day and age that he must carry his religion around with him; anyone who feels obliged to wear a particular dress, who swears grotesque vows, who bands together in herds, and who, when all is said and done, swears unconditional loyalty to Rome, the bitterest enemy of our young German and Prussian glory – such people can have no place in our state. That is why I say: away with them as soon as possible!”

In painting the Church as an anachronism, Exhibit A was Pius IX, who was Pope throughout most of the Kulturkampf era. Pius did not take the progressive assault on European Catholicism lying down. In 1864 he published the Syllabus, a denunciation of the errors of modern thought, and in 1870 the First Vatican Council proclaimed papal infallibility. Nowadays most people understand that the Pope’s claim to infallibility extends only to Christian faith and morals, but in those feverishly anti-clerical and anti-Catholic times, infallibility was interpreted as an attack on the principle of secular government. Pius IX’s stand appeared to weaken his authority among German Catholics, as well. A number of intellectuals had rejected Papal infallibility and formed the Old Catholic Church, with its own hierarchy and priests. To Bismarck, the troubled reign of Pius IX seemed like a golden moment to assert control.

In July 1871 the assault began with the abolition of the Catholic bureau of worship and control of government-Church relations was handed over to Protestant bureaucrats. In November Bismarck passed the Kanzelparagraph (the Pulpit Law) which severely penalised criticism of the government by the clergy. In March 1872, all schools were placed under government control. In July 1872 the Jesuits (and later other religious orders) were expelled or interned. In December 1872 he broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

The pressure on Catholics intensified in May 1873 with the so-called May Laws (or Falk Laws). These were four drastic measures designed to crush the hierarchy and subject the Church totally to government control. At the same time, Bismarck fostered relations with the Old Catholics and tried to establish them as an alternative to the Catholic hierarchy.

In 1875 the fight intensified. A “Breadbasket Bill” was passed which suspended all grants to dioceses if the clergy had not complied with the new laws. All religious orders were dissolved, except socially useful ones involved in nursing and social work. Civil marriage was made obligatory. All Church property was confiscated and ownership was transferred to parish laymen acting as trustees.

By 1878 the Catholic Church appeared to be in a sorry state. Most of its bishops were in exile; thousands of parishes had no priest. It had lost most of its property and power. But in fact Bismarck’s Kulturkampf had run out of steam and most of his measures were about to be dismantled.

Repression, far from crippling the Church, had united it. Although Papal infallibility had not been popular with many German Catholics, nearly all of them closed ranks and presented a united front. In 1870 Catholics formed the Centre Party under the leadership first of Hermann von Mallinckrodt and then of Ludwig Windthorst, two politicians who were remarkable for their eloquence and shrewdness. Their party grew rapidly into a major political force. When Bismarck lost the support of his anti-Catholic political allies, a coalition of National Liberals and Conservatives, he realised that he needed to be reconciled with the Centre. Furthermore, a Marxist-inspired party, the Social Democrats, was also rising rapidly. In Bismarck’s eyes, Catholics were far more congenial than socialists. Nor did Catholics resort to violent resistance – although a Catholic did try to assassinate Bismarck in 1874, an event which just gave him an excuse for more repressive measures.

Pius IX was succeeded as Pope in 1878 by Leo XIII, who took a far more conciliatory line. Bit by bit the May Laws were dismantled. Diplomatic ties with the Vatican were resumed in 1882. By 1890, most of the anti-Catholic legislation was reversed – although it was not until 1917 that Jesuits were allowed to return.

In short, the Kulturkampf had failed miserably and in many ways, it had actually been counterproductive. Instead of uniting the new Germany, Bismarck’s policy had intensified bitter divisions, reduced the moral authority of the state and helped to promote socialism.

Are there any lessons in this history lesson for anxious Americans? MercatorNet consulted Ronald J. Ross, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose book The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf analyses this tumultuous era. “My sense is that the differences far outweigh any similarities,” he says. “Viewed from my vantage point, I see nothing comparable in the governmental intentions of the present day and those of Bismarck's Prussia or Imperial Germany back in the 19th Century. Certainly the kinds of sanctions deployed against the Church during the Kulturkampf are conspicuously absent in the present situation.”

However, in the virulence of the debate, says Professor Ross, there are some similarities. “The term [Kulturkampf] embodied all the confidence, optimism, and belief in progress so characteristic of liberal thinking during the 1860s and 1870s. Without the encouragement and aid of liberals like Virchow, other interest groups, and constituencies, which in turn were energized and emboldened by Bismarck's endorsement of their cause, it is difficult to see how the Kulturkampf could have descended to the levels of loathing it did, dividing the country into two mutually uncomprehending, uncompromising universes. It is here, in this limited sense, with the strident tone of debate, that I can see something of a similarity between the Kulturkampf and the present situation.”

Perhaps the most useful lessons are the most obvious ones. First, it can happen here. Although Prussia was an authoritarian society without a bill of rights, it was not a dictatorship. Harsh restrictions on Catholics were passed democratically after debates in a parliament. Prussia’s progressive intellectual elite supported something which was clearly unjust: suppression of freedom of religion in the name of protecting freedom of thought.

Second, democracy works slowly, but it works. German Catholics worked within the political process to reverse Bismarck’s reforms. In this they found allies amongst Prussian Protestants who objected to state control of religious affairs. With time Bismarck’s strategy for national unity, or rather national uniformity, ran out of steam.

Third, so what if there is institutional martyrdom? Catholics in Prussia lost everything. A few years later they got it back. And what they had lost in property they gained in solidarity.

Finally, the resilience of the Catholic Church should not be underestimated. In 1870 the Church had just lost the Papal States and Pius IX was nursing his wounds behind the walls of the Vatican. Intellectually, the Church's prestige seemed to have hit rock-bottom. The yellow press was full of stories about sexual abuse by priests and depravity in convents. Catholicism seemed like a dinosaur thrashing in its death throes. Yet, within a couple of decades, the picture was quite different. 

Unhappily for the historian, there was no tidy, fairy-tale ending to the Kulturkampf. But as everyone knows, after the era of repression had faded, Germany entered dark new tunnels of terror and hatred. Did the Iron Chancellor’s attempt to crush religious freedom pave the path to that?

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet, where this article was first published under a Creative Commons license. 

Retrieved July 5, 2012 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_kulturkampf_primer

Under Heavy Fire for Years, Blankenhorn Abandons Ship

Paul Adams

One of the positive aspects of David Blankenhorn’s reversal on same-sex marriage is the commentary it has elicited from defenders of marriage like Michael Cook of the dignitarian website MercatorNet and Maggie Gallagher, former chair of the National Organization for Marriage and co-author of an outstanding summary of the research on marriage, The Case for Marriage (2000).  

Who is Blankenhorn?  Gallagher offers a succinct summary of his achievements on behalf of children and marriage:

In the early 1990s, Blankenhorn wrote a book called Fatherless America and launched a think tank (the Institute for American Values) drawing attention to the problem of family fragmentation. He did extraordinary work, bringing together family scholars, policymakers, thinkers, and writers across ideological lines to help form a new consensus that marriage matters.

In 2007, Blankenhorn wrote The Future of Marriage, in which he lays out the evidence that marriage is the union of male and female, oriented toward giving children a father as well as a mother. He agreed to testify on behalf of Prop 8 during Judge Walker’s show trial, and he was one of the few experts who did not run when he learned his testimony might be televised.

The difficulty of responding intellectually to Blankenhorn’s abandonment of the fight for marriage as he understands it is, as Gallagher says, is that “he says he has not changed his mind about the fact that gay marriage represents a step in the de-institutionalization of marriage. He stands by his Proposition 8 testimony. He’s not recanting. He has just lost hope that fighting gay marriage can be part of a strategy for strengthening marriage. He’s left with the hope that somehow if he concedes gay marriage he will be in a strong position to address his core concerns about fatherless America.”

The “wall of hatred” (in Gallagher’s term) confronting anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is extraordinarily vehement and violent.  A tactic of intimidation, it is surely the most extreme outpouring of hatred and abuse in our times from people who consider themselves on the side of tolerance and reason.  It is understandable why someone who has been vilified as publicly and viciously as Blankenhorn - from the scurrilous attacks of the New York Times’s Frank Rich to the hateful, often obscene expressions of intolerance that come from pro-SSM comments in comboxes, on Facebook, and the like - would want to retire from the field of battle, rest and lick his wounds.

Blankenhorn himself is a mild and well-meaning liberal who became deeply concerned about the disintegration and deinstitutionalization of marriage and its devastating effects in poor and minority communities, in particular on their women and children.  He wanted to build a movement and write about marriage as a key social good, our most pro-child institution, while bracketing the issue of same-sex “marriage” as an essentially unrelated question.  He came to see that this was impossible, that the hijacking of marriage for purposes unrelated to its historic and universal understanding and to the needs of children - the desire of some adults to have homosexual relations honored and normalized on the same level as heterosexual relations - was already too far advanced to be ignored.

In his op-ed piece in the New York Times - the paper that launched an extraordinarily nasty, biased and absurdly unfair attack on him just a couple of years ago (one of Rich’s columns was called “Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet”) - Blankenhorn makes it clear that he stands by the arguments he made brilliantly in his 2007 book, The Future of Marriage:

I opposed gay marriage believing that children have the right, insofar as society makes it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. I didn’t just dream up this notion: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1990, guarantees children this right.

Marriage is how society recognizes and protects this right. Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.

At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift. No same-sex couple, married or not, can ever under any circumstances combine biological, social and legal parenthood into one bond. For this and other reasons, gay marriage has become a significant contributor to marriage’s continuing deinstitutionalization, by which I mean marriage’s steady transformation in both law and custom from a structured institution with clear public purposes to the state’s licensing of private relationships that are privately defined.

In the book he had advanced the best definition of marriage I have seen: 

In all or nearly all human societies, marriage is socially approved sexual intercourse between a woman and a man, conceived both as a personal relationship and as an institution, primarily such that any children resulting from the union are—and are understood by the society to be—emotionally, morally, practically, and legally affiliated with both of the parents (p.91).

So why did Blankenhorn side with the bitter enemies of marriage as it has been understood across time and place for millennia, at least since the earliest surviving legal codes?  He has given three reasons. Two are social and almost embarrassingly feeble: the need for “comity” and “respect for an emerging consensus,” especially among “most of our national elites, as well as most younger Americans.”  By comity, he means he does not like conflict, despite years of finding himself unwillingly at the center of one of the most bitter divides in the culture wars.  He is willing to sacrifice principle for getting along.  By consensus, he seems to mean something similar - if you can’t beat them, join them.  (But Michael Cook puts a more sympathetic gloss on this rationale by comparing it to Justice Devlin’s change of heart about the legalization of homosexual behavior in Britain in light of changing public opinion.)  

The third is personal: “the equal dignity of homosexual love”.  It is a position, rejecting the traditional Judeo-Christian position that homosexual desire is disordered.  (This is a complicated question.  Catholic teaching differentiates between same-sex attraction, which is not sinful but is nevertheless disordered, on one hand, and homosexual (i.e., homogenital) activity, which like all other kinds of sex outside marriage or intrinsically, by its very nature, incapable of generating new life, is sinful.  Before the development, originally as the term for a psychopathology, of the term homosexuality (which generated complementary notions of heterosexuality and bisexuality) in the late nineteenth century, strong and lasting love between friends of the same sex was honored and not taken to be “homosexual” in the modern sense, or sexual at all.

Blankenhorn, a liberal Christian, has consistently rejected biblical and Christian teaching on homosexuality and argued that “homosexual love” (by which he means to include sex) should be accorded equal dignity and honor with the love of man and woman.  But until recently he did not take this to be an argument for changing the fundamental nature of marriage.  

Marriage as an institution is mute and formally indifferent on the question of sexual orientation or disposition or desire.  (Classically, a man was judged or defined not by his desires, but by his mastery of them, his virtue.)  Sexual desire or orientation is not a criterion for admission to or exclusion from marriage. And for good reason.  As Blankenhorn (2007) says,  “But if we as a society cross that Rubicon—if sexual desire becomes a valid legal principle for structuring a marriage—it is hard to imagine the moral metric by which bisexual spousal groups would be excluded from this newly orientation-sensitive institution” (p.259).  And indeed, that cat, rejected by SSM advocates just a few years ago as a bogus slippery slope argument, is already out of the bag.

Michael Cook argues that this question of the moral status of homosexual behavior cannot be avoided and that Blankenhorn’s surrender to same-sex marriage was inevitable given his view of the matter.

The Blankenhorn incident is a painful reminder of one of the main failings of our culture – its inability to set boundaries to sexual expression. Fundamentally this has happened because people have come to believe that they can define the purpose of sex for themselves. On Tuesday, it could be love; on Wednesday lust; on Saturday pleasure; or on Sunday simply curiosity. Sex’s link with children and the complementarity of male and female is something incidental, almost irrelevant, to the way we should live our sexuality. 

There are two lessons here. First, unless opponents of gay marriage have firm views on the immorality of homosexual acts, it is almost inevitable that they will follow David Blankenhorn into a grudging acceptance of a new social paradigm. They must hold firm to the truth that homosexual love is not equal in dignity to married love. Second, those views need to be articulated in a way which does not humiliate or vilify homosexuals but gives a clear account of why homosexual acts are an inherently disordered use of sexuality. There is a lot of work to be done here.

I am not sure this is a logically necessary link.  It seems to me perfectly consistent to argue both that:

1. the state should not intervene in most private consensual sexual behavior among adults, not because it judges such activity to be morally proper or equivalent to the conjugal relations of husband and wife, but because it is a hopeless task that contravenes prevailing opinion, would discredit the law (because unenforceable or arbitrarily enforced, like the old sodomy laws or laws against adultery or the English offense of alienating the affections of another’s spouse); and 
2. the state should differentially honor and support marriage as traditionally understood for the reasons Blankenhorn gives:  It is “the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.”

It seems perfectly reasonable to say that the state should not criminalize certain kinds of (immoral) sexual behavior that have become widely accepted and practiced, but that it should discriminate in favor of the one kind of sexual behavior that is capable of generating new life and the institution built on it (without which a marriage is not consummated).

It is also reasonable and right to honor deep and lasting friendships and to respect and accommodate financial interdependence among adults.  The elderly single Burden sisters in England sought in vain to be “treated like lesbians” under the UK’s civil unions law because of their close and lasting interdependence and the impending ruin for the survivor when one died and the other had to sell their family home to pay estate (death) taxes.  Under Hawaii’s former “reciprocal beneficiaries” law, such a situation could have been accommodated because there was no requirement or expectation that those involved in such a relationship be having sex.  Marriage implies, is partly defined by sex; friendship and financial independence are not.

But after years of being vilified and denounced nationally in the harshest terms as a hate-filled bigot (which Blankenhorn never remotely was notwithstanding Rich’s calumnies), these kinds of distinction, though reasonable, may not be emotionally sustainable for a man of Blankenhorn’s mild and peaceable temperament.

Still, Blankenhorn’s notion of seeking new alliances with gays who support the institution of marriage is a feeble hope.  As he himself pointed out in his book, while some supporters of SSM honor marriage as an institution based on exclusive, monogamous commitment between two people, many others support it just because it is part of the de-institutionalization of marriage itself.  Academics who built their whole careers on attacking the institution of marriage and the family suddenly support SSM, not because they want to extend the benefits of a great institution to gays, but because they see it as a key step in the destruction of marriage as understood virtually everywhere and always until yesterday.  For example, as Blankenhorn himself documents in The Future of the Family (2007), Stephanie Coontz and Judith Stacey, who both have attacked traditional marriage for decades and defended its alternatives - divorce, cohabitation, unwed childbearing - welcome SSM precisely for its deinstitutionalizing potential.

And as Cook aptly concludes,

And lest anyone else think that sharing marriage with gays will save it as a social institution, here are some bitter observations about Blankenhorn from Richard Kim, executive editor of the leading progressive magazine The Nation. He thinks that the new player on the gay marriage bench is just as “regressive, archaic and punitive” as he was when he opposed it. All that stuff about what kind of marriage produces the best results for children is irrelevant. “Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians," Kim writes. "I want to scramble that circle.” 

I wish David Blankenhorn the best of luck in building a coalition with the likes of Richard Kim.