“Oh, yes. The government shall not deprive a person of life or liberty except by due process. I love that. Tell me, Ray, how many living human beings with beating hearts and measurable brain waves are slaughtered and harvested every year in your New Body labs?”
“I was talking about the separation of church and state.”
She snaps her head side to side. “That’s not in the Constitution.”
“What?” My brow furrows. “What Constitution are you reading?”
“There’s a separation of church and state in the Communist Manifesto, but not in any of our state or federal constitutions. What you’re thinking of is the First Amendment . . . ”
“Yep.”
“It reads, Congress—not Maryland, not Alabama, not Mississippi—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. States can and should, however . . . ”
I do not even entertain the thought that every person I’ve ever heard speak on the separation of church and state is wrong. She has misunderstood me, or I her—or she’s mad.
“Neither the federal government nor the states have the right to deprive an innocent person of life or liberty without due process. We have a holocaust of innocent people polluting this land with bloodguilt, and no one has any constitutional duty to tolerate it.”
Her face is as red as mine, but I worry that her body cannot handle the pressure. “Right and wrong isn’t so black and white,” I say calmly. “There are no moral absolutes.”
“Are you absolutely sure of that?”
I open my mouth to answer, but hesitate. To say “Yes” is to assert an absolute truth. To say “No” is to contradict my assertion that there’s no absolute truth. The best answer is a red herring, a distraction—I’m good at that. “The courts have settled the matter, Tamara, like slavery, child labor, and gay marriage, the courts have settled it. It’s the world we live in now.”
“Might doesn’t make right, Ray. Just because someone can impose their will on someone else, that doesn’t make it right. Abandon God as the basis for morality and justice, and the death warrant for human rights has been signed.”
“Death warrant for human rights? What?”
“That’s right. There are no human rights at all if there’s no God and if our leaders can trample any minority they please.”
“We have a right to control our own genome. Clones are an extension of the host’s body.”
“Since when does a living human being have two brains? Two hearts? Don’t delude yourself.”
“Clones are genetically identical to the host, minus the mutations. They are the property of the host.”
“Identical twins are genetically identical, but that does not mean that the older and stronger gets to exploit the weaker. Children may be the property of the parents, but does this justify child abuse? Infanticide? Does it?”
My arguments are gone, and I’m left bankrupt before her with my bad excuses. She returns to personal jabs. “Why are you playing games with me, brother? Your company sucks the brains out of living, healthy human beings! You dish out handicapped children to research labs to experiment upon. You kill people and market their bodies to sensuality-obsessed millionaires. And you won’t get away with it, Ray. You will give an account.”
I grit my teeth at my sister’s exaggerated one-liners. “You know, I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
“Well, why did you come?”
“I guess I feel sorry for you. I don’t think you’re responsible for that explosion.”
“Oh, don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for yourself. I sense the Creator’s grief as He witnesses your public praise and”—she waves her hands over her head for emphasis—“and, and all your accolades for your New Body brain-sucking machines and the passage of that devilish law you’ve been deceiving the public about every day for the last two months.”
“What? The law I have supported helps protect the dupes, Tamara. They can even be adopted out.”
“Adopted to medical research facilities, where they can experiment on these non-persons as they would on slugs or monkeys. Not to families where they are regarded as people.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you even read the Bill?”
My cheeks burn. I’ve publicly lobbied for a Bill I’ve never even fully read. “I want to regulate this technology to save lives and protect against abuses.”
She lowers her head and shudders. When she raises her countenance to me again, her eyes have moistened. “Oh, Ray. No piece of legislation since Roe v. Wade has legitimized more abuse and bloodshed than the law you have helped to pass. You even legalized the creation of chimeras, human-animal mutants . . . ”
I object sternly, “What? By preventing their creation?”
“Your law only prevents bringing them to maturity in the wombs of legal persons. Your law justifies the creation and exploitation of human-animal hybrids through regulation. Your scientists can create and deliver a human-animal hybrid in the womb of a human clone.”
I shake my head side to side. She can’t be right.
“Ray, you need to read your own Bill and stop blindly believing and repeating the Administration’s talking points. Mass murderers tend not to be trustworthy.”
I steel my face at her eloquence and apparent familiarity with the lesser known details of the Bill I helped pass. “Our brother Thomas, who leads Iowans Supporting Life . . . ”
“Oh yes, Iowans Supporting Life,” she quips mockingly.
“Thomas said my legislation will save lives. Republican leadership has strongly supported me. I was one of the only ones from the left to step out onto the stage and oppose the President, Tamara. Think about that! Your pro-family and pro-life heroes regard me as their hero.”
“When your sails stretch with any wind, you cannot assume every wind is God and every direction is God’s will.” She is quiet as I consider the metaphor’s meaning. “Without a firm foundation on God’s Word, everything built thereupon is unreliable. Many support evil in the name of the lesser of two evils, but that doesn’t redeem evil or make it virtuous. Supporting a moral evil in the name of the best of two evils is a defiant act of unbelief that offends God, who alone is Creator and Judge.”
“Our brother believes in God. Are you saying Thomas is not sincere?”
“His sincerity is irrelevant. He’s supporting laws that dehumanize creatures created in God’s image, laws that justify the slaughter of the least and most helpless of God’s children.”
“The fact that it was the best alternative to President Sayder’s proposals isn’t even a consideration for you, is it?”
“God’s opinion trumps man’s, brother. When Israel abandoned God’s command to conquer their Promised Land because they feared the giants in that land, it was an act of unbelief—a defiant, stubborn refusal to trust in God’s power and be obedient. There is no such thing as a good alternative that includes the intentional shedding of innocent blood, trampling God’s law underfoot. God takes it personally when the least of us are intentionally killed, and He will take vengeance.”
“You know what you are? You’re a hypocrite, Tamara!”
“A hypocrite?”
“Yes, a hypocrite. You rebuke killing out of one side of your mouth, but the radicals who sit under your authority bomb and maim for your cause. I saw the security video of the bomb that almost killed me, Tamara. A Mr. Chuck Dutro, affiliated with your Personhood Now group.”
“And what’s wrong with targeting innocent people with bombs, Ray, if there is no moral absolute?”
“It’s wrong. You know that. It’s terrorism.”
“Oh, I agree most adamantly. How can you disagree, if right and wrong are just personal opinions and there are no moral absolutes? And how can there be moral absolutes without God?”
“Which God?”
She smiles. “The real One. There’s only one.”
I flutter my eyes at her verbal jousting. I know, all too well, where she’s going wi
th this line of reasoning—right to yet another personal rebuke to repent or be damned. No, thank you. I refuse to follow her breadcrumbs.
My hands reach for my forehead. “Please, Tamara, your fire-and-brimstonin’ is giving me a headache.”
“Funny. The only part of you that’s actually you hurts when your indefensible web of fragile lies is emasculated at the whisper of the truth.”
“You don’t whisper. You scream with a bullhorn.”
“I used ‘whisper’ metaphorically. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.”
“You know, Tam, I didn’t have to come here.”
“We forced Chuck Dutro out of our group months before his bombing of NBS. He was probably a federal agent.”
“Why would a federal agent blow himself up at a TV studio while yelling ‘Personhood now!’?”
“So, you think he blew himself up, huh?”
“Spare me your conspiracy theories.”
“If he did detonate that bomb, he did it for the same reason he always endorsed violence against cloners. He was trying to give the federal government cause to persecute us and shut us down.”
“And why would the government want to do that?”
“Because we are one of the last remnants in the country still taking a stand on God’s Word, and the devil has his crosshairs on us.”
“With his crosshairs set on you, why would he try to kill the Press Secretary?”
“I told you. To give the government cause to eliminate the opposition. If President Sayder labels us a terrorist group, she doesn’t even have to afford us a trial. And I doubt Dutro was targeting the President’s Press Secretary. He was probably targeting you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because I’m praying for you and, locked away in here, I have a lot of time to pray. Like the Egyptian Prince Moses and the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, you’re going to do a 180 and help pioneer opposition to the bloodguilt you brought upon this nation. You’re a threat to the holocaust, Ray, and the devil knows it. Just remember, not many mighty or noble according to the flesh are called by God. No flesh will glory in God’s presence, Ray. He gives grace to the humble, not the powerful.”
This is not the painful personal jab I expected it would be. Her words seem to tenderize me, almost weaken me physically and mentally. “As wicked as you think I am, you still hold out hope for me, huh, sis?”
“Where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. And those who are forgiven much, love much.”
I ignore her strange forecast of my future and focus on the enlightening information she shared about the bombing suspect. President Sayder did tell me in the foyer of my New Body Research Center that she had a plan to crack down on political dissidents. “Do you have evidence that you kicked the bombing suspect out of your organization?”
“Phil Stephens will confirm it. He was with me when I met with Dutro and he was with me when we forbade him to attend our meetings. Phil’s on our Board of Directors. Lives in Birmingham.”
“Tamara, if there is a God, how can He object to us living in the Garden of Eden, in perfect bodies?”
She gives me a sly grin, like she hoped I would ask that question. “God kicked man out of the Garden for the same reason He confused our language at the Tower of Babel. Power without the virtue to sustain it just hastens our judgment. To whom much is given, much is required.” She leans close to me, with her nose barely touching the glass. “Look at me, Ray. You have been given much. God’s going to hold you accountable. From the day you started making vaccines using stem cells from babies whose abortion you funded, you’ve been staining your hands with innocent blood, dulling your conscience and—”
“Oh, please, Tamara! You’re not going to get on that again.”
Tamara stands to her feet and points at me through the glass. “You killed two first trimester children and biopsied their lung tissue to create Merck’s chickenpox vaccine. Japan swabbed the throat of a child to make their rubella vaccine, but not here in America. No, Merck crafted their rubella vaccine from the third kidney biopsy of their 27th aborted baby. Sanofi Pasteur created their polio vaccine exploiting the lung tissue taken from a 14-week-old boy inside a 27-year-old English woman. Eli Lilly kills a baby for their drug for rheumatoid arthritis. How many dead babies did you liquefy in giant blenders so you could sell their collagen to shampoo manufacturers? On and on it goes, ever more creative and vile, the killing continues. Do you know what that spells, Ray?”
“Health—that’s what it spells. Cost effective management of difficult social realities.”
“Bloodguilt, Ray, bloodguilt. Health for the exploiters comes at the cost of bloodguilt. It started with aborting deformed fetuses, or those conceived in rape and incest, but now you’re butchering perfectly normal healthy people and exploiting them for gain. God will avenge the innocent, Ray. You will give an account. But there’s a blood that speaks something better than the blood of Abel.”
A guard steps in behind my elderly sister. He flips a switch on the wall, and her phone goes silent. It was good that he did so, because I am fuming mad and ready to curse her out. Tears burst forth from her tired eyes and swim down her wrinkled cheeks. Her lips begin to quiver, I suppose, from an anxious tremor for some self-imposed misery, and my anger dissolves in a sea of pity. I feel sorry for her. I really do. She means well, but she’s so hopelessly shackled to a book of dogma as a standard for morality when it should be viewed simply as a book of interesting stories. Her book, like other books of religion, is too impractical and obsolete for the modern era.
I pull the phone away from my ear and shrug. Her hopeful eyes drop to the floor. She hangs up the phone and presses her right palm against the glass. Her fingers are uniformly arthritic and calloused from all of her years of service to those who can never thank her for it. The muscles of her palm have shriveled until her hand and forearm appear to be all tendon and bone.
I stretch out a finger and tap the glass over her palm. “Good bye, sis.”
I read her lips: “I’m not giving up on you.”
14
I’M IN THE BACK SEAT of my hover-limousine, being driven to my last scheduled appointment at a television station in downtown New York City. I am being hailed from the left and the right as a heroic unifier of viciously oppositional political forces, bringing two extremes together to shake hands on a genuine compromise for the sake of a critically necessary, common-sense law. The undeniable bottom line, however, is beginning to take hold: despite all my excuses about wanting to compassionately protect clones from abuses, the law effectively legalizes cloning and the termination of dupes nationwide. The law was amended at the last moment to bear my name—“The Verity Cloning with Compassion Bill.”
I feel a buzz on my nanophone behind my right ear, and tap it.
“Phillip Stephens, Birmingham, Alabama,” my nanophone announces. His voice is small, and whiny.
I tap it again. “Mr. Stephens, thank you for returning my call.”
“Lest I be mistaken, this is the Dr. Raymond Verity?”
“In the flesh. Well, actually, no. In the mind.”
Phil chuckles nervously at my lousy attempt at self-depreciating humor. “I’m stunned that you would want to call me, given that we, you know . . . .” I leave his rhetorical comment unanswered. “Well, what can I do for you?”
“I spoke with my sister in jail. Is it true that she kicked Chuck Dutro out of Personhood Now because he endorsed violence?”
He clears his throat uneasily. “Yes, that is true.”
“Did any federal investigators question you about this?”
“No. And I informed the investigators and their department heads by letter, email, and phone. Why do you care what they do to your sister? She’s got to be the prickliest thorn in your side.”
“If she’s innocent, I’d prefer her not to be judged guilty.”
“You’re a mass murderer, Dr. Verity, single-handedly responsible for the law that legitimizes it, effectively eliminatin
g peaceful resistance from sidewalks to editorial pages to statehouses all over the country.”
My ears heat up. “Federal law trumps state law, Mr. Stephens. I didn’t write the Constitution.”
He chuckles condescendingly. “And those who did write it didn’t put that nonsense in there.”
“And I thank you for that expert opinion,” I sneer.
“How about the expert opinion of Alabama Governor Whetley and State Attorney Shane Mease?”
“Masters of law, I’m sure,” I quip sarcastically.
“They are committed to nullifying your tyrannical law and arresting those who violate their state law banning terminations.”
“If they do it, may they face the consequences with as much courage as they exhibit when they defy the law.”
“States defy the federal judiciary all the time, on medical marijuana and on many issues, without any federal consequences whatsoever. It is firmly entrenched in state and federal law that lesser civil authorities may actively resist unlawful, unconstitutional federal laws and judicial opinions.”
“Are all anti-cloners supportive of medical marijuana? Seems like a strange combination of beliefs to me, kind of like being against abortion and supporting the death penalty.”
Mr. Stephens is publicly supportive of the death penalty and anti-abortion laws, but he doesn’t let me distract him. “I think medical marijuana is bad law and even worse medicine. I’m just glad to see states standing up to federal tyranny, and wish pro-lifers would have as much courage to stop mass murder as pot-smokers are to remedy their migraines.”
“So Governor Whetley and his puppet Shane Mease are going to arrest David Starr, just like that, in defiance of federal law?”
He snaps his fingers in the receiver. “Just like that. They’d better, if they want to fulfill their sworn duty to protect the innocent within their lawful jurisdiction.”
“Well, don’t stop there. Go ahead and get the abortionists, and the euthanizers . . . ”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they do . . . ”
“And the pediatricians who issue vaccines made from aborted fetal stem cells, and the gynecologists who prescribe hormonal contraception. Go ahead and stone the Muslims and the Hindus, too, while you’re at it.”
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