Saturday, January 31, 2009

New NAC website very much in the firing line

This morning Declan thought it best if we left the Catholic Manna Centre at 9.00am, for the third Saturday in a row (see blog of 21 January “Violence and economic strangulation”); on this occasion, Declan was man-handled in the men’s toilets by a homeless who insisted that he engage in conversation with him. We left without Declan getting a bite to eat.

Declan continues to wash in the street, which he has been doing since 10 April last year as a result of all the harassment he has received from other homeless: see, for example, blog of 16 May 2008 “More racially aggravated harassment in the Dellow Centre”; or blog of 18 June 2008 “Declan robbed in the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre”; or blog of 19 June 2008 “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”. On 18 June 2007, we were barred from the Methodist Church Whitechapel Mission by the minister’s wife due to concerns about our safety after I was assaulted in an unprovoked attack by a homeless woman in the canteen (see here). Declan has written on several occasions to the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, in his capacity as Archbishop of the Diocese of Westminster, to which the Dellow Centre belongs (see blog of 6 November 2008 “Letter to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor”).

It seems that the new NAC website that I am building in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning at http://network.obxhost.net/index.html is still very much in the firing line: Declan had no problem accessing it this morning from the local internet cafĂ© but I was once again unable to access it or the web host from our local council’s Idea Store Whitechapel (see blog of 23 January “Letter to the Leader of Tower Hamlets Council”). In fact, I still can’t, meaning I can’t upload an article by Steven Pinker entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity” (see below).

Pinker, world-renowned thinker and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (and an honorary associate of NAC and early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning), argues that the concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. It’s not surprising, then, he wrote on 28 May last, that ‘dignity’ is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican’s recent pronouncements on biomedicine. In its most authoritative declaration on bioethics for more than 20 years, the Vatican released on 12 December a 32-page document titled “Dignitas Personae” (the dignity of a person).

As I stated in the previous blog, we received our first donation last Monday and I believe this may be influencing things: perhaps to discourage somebody else for doing the same. For example, this morning I emailed 35 scientists and academics in New York State inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning but received no autoreplies and no-one has signed – I received one undelivered email to my spam box. To date, the petition has been signed by 589 scientists and academics, who include recognised authorities from the world’s leading universities and research institutes, as well as 24 Nobel Laureates.

This is the document (three pages) I am waiting to upload: