We have ordered our series on the natural law so that it can be read first post to last post below.  It ends with a Halloween example of the natural law in the news.  Here is another of those:

By MARIA CHENG (AP) – 1 day ago

LONDON — British scientists begin a new study on Tuesday to consider how human DNA is used in animal experiments and to determine what the boundaries of such controversial science might be.

Though experts have been swapping human and animal DNA for years — like replacing animal genes with human genes or growing human organs in animals — scientists at the Academy of Medical Sciences want to make sure the public is aware of what is happening in laboratories before proceeding further.

“It sounds yucky, but it may be well worth doing if it’s going to lead to a cure for something horrible,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell expert at Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research, and a member of the group conducting the study.

At a media briefing in London, Lovell-Badge said there were two main types of experiments: altering an animal’s genes by adding human DNA or replacing a specific animal sequence with its human counterpart.

***

Two years ago, controversy erupted in Britain after scientists announced plans to create human embryos using empty cow and rabbit eggs.

***

Scientists said they are now trying to determine where the line should be drawn on experiments that use human material in animals. At the moment, the regulation on how much human DNA can be put into an animal is vague.

“We are trying to work out what is reasonable,” said Martin Bobrow, chairman of the group conducting the study. He and others said they recognized people might be nervous about experiments where animals were given human features or brain cells.

David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, an independent watchdog, said he was not convinced such experiments were warranted. “This is a classic example of science going too fast,” he said. “If you cannot firmly say exactly what it is you’re creating, you should not do it.”

Full article here

Dr. Rice explained it in detail last Friday night in our symposium.  Here  is his explanation from 50 Questions:

(Oh, keep Justice Clarence Thomas in mind through all of these posts, as that we will revisit his Senate confirmation hearings in the final post in this series.)

Here  are some posts on the difference that the choice can make in a social order:

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/natural-law-or-legal-positism-that-is-the-question/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/executive-directors-post-july-4th-post-6/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/honoring-alexander-solzhenitsyn-post-7/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/398/

Our dear Professor Charlie Rice borrows from another great legal academic mind, Harold Berman (Law and Revolution is a great read!) to give us this snapshot of life in postmodern America:IN the next installment in this series we will return to the subject of Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing.  If you have not read the first post in this series you should so that you can understand the next post and the hard lesson that it teaches.  (Page down to “afterglow” to find the first installment in this series.)

This post sets up our conclusion to our most recent series of posts on the Natural Law.

But before we return to Justice Clarence Thomas’ nomination to end the series we must first drop back to a nomination now 22 years in the past.  Remember Judge Robert Bork?  He was the cause of the term “borked” entering our lexicon.  Here is some background on the battle that kept that fine man off of the High Court:

From the WSJ Opinion Archives

Twenty years ago today the United States Senate voted to reject President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The senators may have had every reason to believe that was the end of the story. However ugly it had been, however much time it had taken, Mr. Bork’s defeat was only one more routine sacrifice to partisan politics. But time would prove wrong anyone who actually thought that. The battle over Mr. Bork was politically transformative, its constitutional lessons enduring.

***

It was immediately clear that the unprecedented vote of 58-42 against his confirmation reflected something far more historic and fundamental than an ordinary partisan standoff. The confrontation in fact had been one of the most cataclysmic and divisive events in American domestic politics during the second half of the 20th century. The reason was that Mr. Bork’s opponents succeeded in making the fight over his nomination into a contest over the future of the Constitution.

The issue that united the judge’s critics in their fiery, scorched-earth opposition was never his ability or reputation but rather his theory of judging. Mr. Bork’s belief was that judges and justices in their interpretations of the Constitution must be bound to the original intentionsof its framers. In his sober constitutional jurisprudence there was no room for any airy talk about a general right of privacy, allegedly unwritten constitutions, vague notions of unenumerated rights, or what the progressive Justice Black once derided as “any mysterious and uncertain natural law concept.” For Mr. Bork, the framers said what they meant, and meant what they said.

Mr. Bork’s approach had its roots in hundreds of years of common law history as well as in the political philosophy of those whose works serve as the foundation of American constitutionalism. Chief Justice John Marshall had summed up that received tradition when he proclaimed that recourse to a lawgiver’s original intention is “the most sacred rule of interpretation.” In Marshall’s view, it is always “the great duty of a judge who construes an instrument . . . to find the intention of its makers.” As with Marshall, so also with Mr. Bork.

****

Time has shown that Mr. Bork’s theory of constitutional interpretation remains very much alive; he was defeated but his central idea was never discredited. That theory of interpretation and its implicit belief in restrained judging should continue to guide anyone who believes that the inherent arbitrariness of government by judiciary is not the same thing as the rule of law.

Judge Robert Bork went down in flames and the High Court instead got Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote pragmatist.

Next comes Clarence Thomas.  He had written on the Natural Law.  His jurisprudence, as once voiced, was even more disconcerting to the Left than Judge Bork’s.

What would the Left demand to allow a Justice Thomas?

Stay tuned, that is the next post.

Read this post to be fully prepared for the final post in this series.

Pictured above:  The bas relief on the front of the United States Supreme Court.  Looks like a separation of church and state problem through modernist eyes.  From the Supreme Court’s own website:

Too often, visitors do not see the corresponding pediment and columns on the east side. Here the sculpture group is by Hermon A. MacNeil, and the marble figures represent great lawgivers,

Moses, Confucius, and Solon, flanked by symbolic groups representing Means of Enforcing the Law, Tempering Justice with Mercy, Settlement of Disputes Between States, and Maritime and other functions of the Supreme Court. The architrave bears the legend: “Justice the Guardian of Liberty.”

Forget Anita Hill.  She was a shill, a smokescreen, a popular cause to rally behind.  She was an assassin, yes, but the question is why was she stationed in the book depository window in the first place?

It was not to strike a blow for sexual harassment.  Ted Kennedy sat in judgment of this very fine man, as did many other Democrat and Republican Senators who engaged in acts much more grievous than those Anita Hill charged against Thomas. 

Damnable hypocrites, all.

If not sexual harassment, why then, the assassin Anita Hill?

The answer is The Natural Law.  More specifically how the Natural Law could affect Roe v. Wade, the High Court’s lawless 1973 ruling that created, out of thin air, a “constitutional right” to terminate pregnancies equal to (or great to in the minds of the elite) all other rights in the Bill of Rights.  

Clarence Thomas was a proponent of The Natural Law.   The Natural Law is no friend of abortion on demand.

Thomas caved under Senate pressure and renounced the Natural Law as a guide for America’s post modern judiciary – surely the price one must pay to become a judge in post modern America.

(As an aside, this website may soon post evidence that one even has to do that to become an attorney in some jurisdictions in post modern America.)

If you have read this post then you are now ready to read “the rest of the story” on Justice Clarence Thomas’ rocky road to the High Court.

Those in the know at the time realized that Thomas was a threat to the post modern legal landscape and thus had to be “neutered.”

He was.  Professor Charles Rice knows the score.  He tells us in 50 Questions that it went down like this:

We conclude this series on Natural Law to bring you breaking news about … The Natural Law.

OR is it?  You tell us, there is a quiz at the end of the article.

Natural law can be read easier than tea leaves in the area of human reproduction.  But then there is the question of who gets to interpret the tea leaves,  a much harder question.

Read the previous posts and you, too, can do Natural Law.

OK, Pop Quiz #1:  Does this violate Natural Law?

Eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in a breakthrough process that could change the face of parenthood. ***

But the ability to generate life from the earliest stages also raises myriad moral and ethical concerns.

These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.

The U.S. government-funded research, published in the prestigious journal Nature, centres on stem cells, ‘master cells’ widely seen as a repair kit for the body.

The Stanford University scientists found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into turning into eggs and sperm.

The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg.
***

The American team used stem cells taken from embryos in the first days of life but hope to repeat the process with slivers of skin.

The skin cells would first be exposed to a mixture that wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm or eggs.

Starting with a person’s own skin would also mean the lab-grown sperm or eggs would not be rejected by the body.

The science also raises the possibility of ‘male eggs’ made from men’s skin and ‘female sperm’.

***

This would allow gay and lesbian couples to have children that are genetically their own, although many scientists are sceptical about whether it is possible to create sperm from female cells which lack the male Y chromosome.

The U.S. breakthrough could also unlock many of the secrets of egg and sperm production, leading to new drug treatments for infertility, a heartbreaking but little understood condition that affects one in six couples.

Defects in sperm and egg development are the biggest cause of infertility but, because many of the key stages occur in the womb, scientists have struggled to study the process in detail.

Researcher Rita Reijo Pera said: ‘We arise from eggs and sperm but we don’t really know how they are made.

‘We are going to learn an incredible amount about human development.  Sometimes the public doesn’t understand how amazingly powerful that is scientifically.

‘The amount of knowledge we can get is absolutely amazing.’ ***

Josephine Quintavalle, of campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, warned that any flaws in the artificial sperm or eggs could be passed on to future generations.

She added: ‘Our means of addressing infertility are becoming more and more convoluted.

‘We have to learn how to say “no”.’

Anthony Ozimic, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: ‘As with IVF, artificial insemination and the use of donor gametes, the use of artificial gametes in reproduction would distort and damage relations between family members.

‘There are no instances of any major medical advance achieved by abandoning basic ethical principles such as safeguarding the right to life.’

Dr Reijo Pera said any future use of artificial eggs and sperm would have to be subject to guidelines.

She said: ‘Whether one builds the boundaries on religion or just on an internal sense of right and wrong, these are important.

‘In this field, it is not “anything goes”.’

REALLLLLYYY?  Well just where do you draw the line?  Scientific experiments on dead body parts freshly dug up in the local graveyard?  Well it is good to have some barriers.

We see that teasing the building blocks of human life out of embryonic “slaves” is not beyond the pale, at least in the labs of some government scientists.

OK, POP Quiz #2:

Who gets to decide what is right and wrong?  Everywoman?  The scientists?  Government attorneys?  Shall we ask the embryo chained to a petri dish to offer up its stem cells until death do they part?

Who decides who gets to decide?

That it the big problem with The Natural Law.  Someone has to declare it.  Who should we ask about this story?  Martin Luther trusted the University.  Can we?  King Henry VIII put that call in the hands of the English Monarchy.  Should we?  Some say just turn to Scripture.  What says the Scripture on stem cell research?  On the slavery of embryos?  Should we ask Billy Graham? His son?  James Dobson?  His VP over public policy (medical ethics division)?  Or should we ask Joel Osteen, Robert Schuler, or Randall Terry or Father Guido Sarducci?

If we ask them all, and others, we are sure to get differing answers on how The Natural Law applies.

WOULD TO GOD THAT THERE WAS AN ANSWER TO THIS CONUNDRUM, FOR WE SURE NEED THE NATURAL LAW IN THIS DIFFICULT HOUR!!!

Here is the entire article from which that in red above was excerpted.