Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 99

Many people still believe not only that homosexuality is deeply wrong, but also that homosexual sexual relations should be illegal, and, indeed, severely punished – as had been the case in the United States for many years: “All states had laws against sodomy by 1960” (Mattachine Society, 1964, 1), often with very long maximum terms of imprisonment – and even life imprisonment in the case of one state (GLAPN, 2007, 1).These attitudes were deeply rooted in religious views, especially Christian and Islamic teachings, and the current decline in religious beliefs has been accompanied by a decline in such beliefs about homosexuality (Pew Research Center, 2013).

In the United States, a major turning point was the Supreme Court decision, in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, that laws against sodomy were unconstitutional, and since then there has been a dramatic change in the attitudes of many Americans on several issues involving homosexuals. Thus, in 2019, a Gallup poll found that 73% of Americans believe that homosexual relations should be legal, while since 2016, over 60% have believed that same‐sex marriages should be recognized by law as valid. In addition, by 2019, 75% of Americans believed that homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children (PPRI, 2019).

Since such views are very widely accepted by philosophers working in ethics, and since the contrary views are generally rooted in religious beliefs, such as those of evangelical Protestants in the United States – beliefs that there are strong arguments against – there are good grounds for concluding that homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children. If so, then another important advantage of implementing the cloning of persons is that, as Philip Kitcher (1997, 61) and others have noted, cloning would seem to be a desirable method of providing a homosexual couple with children that they could raise, since, in the case of a gay couple, each child could be a clone of one person, while in the case of a lesbian couple, every child could, in a sense, be biologically connected with both people:

A lesbian couple wishes to have a child. Because they would like the child to be biologically connected to each of them, they request that a cell nucleus from one of them be inserted into an egg from the other, and that the embryo be implanted in the uterus of the woman who donated the egg (1997, 61).¹