Genetics must be banned!
Although I await Steve Sailer’s and John Derbyshire’s weighing in on the subject, let me start off by saying that I can’t imagine what could possibly have been accomplished by the Senate’s passage of a bill to ban “genetic discrimination” based on genetic test results.
According to The Hill:
“Senators speaking on behalf of the measure on Thursday likened it to legislation aimed at ending gender and race discrimination. ‘It’s the first civil rights bill of the new century of life sciences,’ said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the Senate floor.”
The president seemed to be backing the bill, and this sparked NRO to rationalize the inherent goodness of passing it. I suspect that if the President’s Council on Bioethics were around a hundred years ago, they’d have been horrified by the notion of transplanting someone’s kidney into another human—clearly this is an overstep of the natural order that should be federally banned!
The fact is, genes affect susceptibility to disease, and genetic testing can help pinpoint just how and to what degree and thus help insurance companies design specific regimes for specific clients. Washington’s banning of testing simply means that we’ll all be paying higher premiums in order to account for the added risk companies bear due to their taking on certain patients who could easily have been put on different plans.
And then there’s the real reason why Washington got involved and why Teddy is claiming that this is a “civil rights” issue.
Let’s put it this way, if we’re all 99.9% the same (or interchangeable), if genes don’t matter, if we’re all blank slates waiting to be written on by the environment, then why ban genetic testing?—and why mention gender and race?
Comments
The only person to vote against the House version was Ron Paul.
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I am curious to see the interplay with the claim that homosexual inclinations are genetic. It should be temporarily interesting before everybody adopts the less rational position and it becomes more horrifying than fun. —not that I am pessimistic.
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Steve Sailer is great. If the world was fair he’d be the most famous journalist in the country and David Brooks and Pete Beinhart would be scrubbing toilets.
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Banning discrimination is not banning testing. The purpose of the bill is to prevent insurance companies deciding to not cover children with genetic defects.
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As Whittaker Chambers wrote over 50 years ago, in response to Ayn Rand’s
evil screeds,
“To a gas chamber, go!”
That’s what you’re really saying.
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The original premise behind forced integration was that our prejudice was rooted in stereotypes and frequent interaction with blacks would make whites see them as people just like them. My personal experience, and that of many others, is that actual, day-to-day interaction with other groups, particularly urban blacks, makes one realize how different they are. IQ testing, genetic science, and the study of anthropology only makes these inborn and cultural differences more apparent.
Racism used to mean irrational animus against other races; today it means rational account and recognition of differences. So we’re not supposed to notice or care that the Third World is taking over our country through a deliberate social engineering scheme created by the ‘65 Immigration Act.
Genetic discrimination has many salutary uses, and it’s simply foisting a social policy in the form of an unfunded mandate upon insurance companies to make them take care of these folks, rather than families or even the government through a transparent scheme of social insurance when science says the “P & L” is negative from the get go.
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@Anti-Ayn,
What!?! Talk about reductio ad Hitlerum! The idea that taking genetics seriously leads to Nazism is YOUR fantasy not mine.
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This is no different than mandating an insurance pool for high risk drivers who otherwise would be uninsured (a common system I believe). Insurance companies would love nothing better than to cherry-pick the healthiest people and leave the rest in the lurch (disclosure: I have no obvious genetic defects, my wife’s claims notwithstanding).
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Power corrupts. Especially when concentrated in the hands of modern medicine. The Left may be right for all the wrong reasons on this one. But, whither the conservatives? Won’t genetic testing spurred onward by market rationalizations and social striving lead to eugenics? Is the right to privacy no longer a concern?
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