{"id":5179,"date":"2005-07-19T10:10:46","date_gmt":"2005-07-19T10:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/bioethics-at-the-movies.html"},"modified":"2005-07-19T10:10:46","modified_gmt":"2005-07-19T10:10:46","slug":"bioethics-at-the-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/bioethics-at-the-movies.html","title":{"rendered":"Bioethics at the movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good, meaty James Bowman piece from the New Atlantis<\/a> that begins with a new production of Whose LIfe is it Anyway? <\/em>in London, starring Kim Cattrall (of Sex in the City)<\/em>  and moves in all sorts of interesting directions.<\/p>\n

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American popular culture in general and Hollywood in particular is naturally libertarian in its sympathies, but it has a particular interest in keeping these connections out of sight of its audience, which includes a big majority of religious believers. There is at the very heart of it, therefore, a form of dishonesty. This involves an attempt to pretend that property, in which Americans also tend to be strong believers, is the inevitable metaphor for their stake in their own lives, and that there is no question of any liens upon such property held by the Almighty. Practically, this deception takes a slightly different form in each of the three cases. With respect to sexual behavior, morality is transformed into "repression," a useful idea derived from vulgar Freudianism. With respect to abortion, morality is replaced by "choice" \u2014 a metaphor from the market economy (also popular in America) and exploited for all it is worth by the advocates of legal abortion \u2014 even though the actual choice on screen is often to have the baby. And when it comes to euthanasia or assisted suicide, morality\u2019s substitute is "compassion" \u2014 presumed to be a moral quality itself which trumps all others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A good, meaty James Bowman piece from the New Atlantis that begins with a new production of Whose LIfe is it Anyway? in London, starring Kim Cattrall (of Sex in the City)  and moves in all sorts of interesting directions. American popular culture in general and Hollywood in particular is naturally libertarian in its sympathies,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBioethics at the movies - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/bioethics-at-the-movies.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bioethics at the movies - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A good, meaty James Bowman piece from the New Atlantis that begins with a new production of Whose LIfe is it Anyway? in London, starring Kim Cattrall (of Sex in the City)  and moves in all sorts of interesting directions. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}