Apparently, the day after Christmas, an alien-worshipping Canadian cult produced the first human clone. And how were your holidays?
I'm going to go out on a limb here: Something about this group is a little off.
According to the cult's founder (a French sportswriter/racecar driver named Claude), he was on his way to work one day in 1973 when he was sidetracked by a spaceship on top of a volcano. Voluptuous female robots (this being France, after all) descended from the spaceship and told Claude the secret of life: We humans originated thousands of years ago when aliens cloned themselves to populate the Earth.
They told him this in perfect French. I'm not sure what this says about the aliens, but it says something about the French.
So Claude changed his name to Rael and, naturally, started a religion teaching his followers, the Raelians (sounds a little better than the Claude-ians), the holy gospel of aliens, cloning ,and voluptuous female robots. Eventually, the French had enough of this and the cult moved to Canada and started its own company, Clonaid.
Did the Raelians clone a baby? Let's just say their credibility is a bit suspect. (News this morning that they lied about a promised DNA test further confirms that.)
But cloning is for real and human cloning is enough of a real possibility that the president of the United States felt compelled to comment on it during Christmas week. Bush called the claim "deeply troubling."
These spacey followers of a French sportswriter want to live forever. The people who are financially supporting their company, Clonaid, are desperate infertile couples who want babies.
Unfortunately, human cloning is not the miracle answer to infertility. It is the distorted end result of a 20-year journey down the path of in vitro fertilization, frozen embryo warehousing, and surrogate motherhood.
Well-intentioned families have benefited from these methods by achieving parenthood but as the science progresses (or digresses), God is removed from the equation and mad scientists are allowed to play with the origins of life.
There is Clonaid's claim that a human skin cell plus a woman's egg plus a little electricity is all it takes to perfectly reproduce any and all human beings.
Then there is the hard fact that there are over 100,000 children in foster care in the United States alone waiting to be adopted. There are hundreds of thousands of other children worldwide who need loving homes.
While Rael was doing the Electric Slide with those voluptuous female robots aboard that flying saucer, I'll bet God was creating the future parents of an adoptive child. Maybe this week He'll show them that the reason they can't conceive a child is that their child already exists. Then He'll help them find and adopt that child, and provide that child with a home and loving parents.
Stranger things have happened.
— Susan Konig, a journalist, has just written a book, Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (and other lies I tell my children).
