And the weekend good news: Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is dead

I like the hypocrisy of people insisting that we must never speak bad of the dead. Why not? If the dead were bad people, what's wrong with wishing them good riddance. A case in point is Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (better known as Dr Beetroot), the former South African health minister. Her policies and that of her boss Thabo ('I don't know anybody who died on AIDS in South Africa.') Mbeki led to about 300,000 preventable deaths among infected people. Beetroot insisted that it ain't clear that HIV causes AIDS, and claimed that anti-retrovirals for Africans were an evil scheme by the CIA and the pharmaceutical industry to poison Africans. Those suffering from, and dying on AIDS she offered, well, you guessed it, beetroot, lemon juice and garlic. Moron that she was she thought nothing of it to jump the waiting list for organ transplantations in order to grab a liver when her old failed as a result of her marriage to alcohol. Excuses were found for why this woman, in her 60s at the time, was deserving of the liver (ie public sector clinicians, working for her, colluded in lies about her legitimate rank on the waiting list). During the time it became public knowledge that as a hospital doctor in Botswana she was convicted of stealing patients' property while they were in surgery. It didn't occur to the ANC and its senior officials to fire Dr Beetroot. Well, I was elated when I found out that the transplant liver crapped up on her, and the system refused to offer her yet another one. Good riddance Dr Beetroot. Thabo, we're waiting for you to join her. After all, you also like your booze and there's some 300,000 people who are dead today because of you. Why don't you also call it a day?

On a slightly more analytical (as opposed to purely angry) level (even though my anger about these two South African politicians' murderous policies knows few boundaries, I have admit): What is of interest is that there's a pattern of colonial mentalities in play in South Africa as well as in Uganda. In South Africa, black nationalist politicians happily ganged up with Western crank scientists against their own people, because they were suspicious of mainstream Western science and knowledge. White Westerners taught them stuff that translated into genocidal policies costing about 300,000 predominantly black people's lives in that country alone. The attempted political emancipation drove these black nationalists straight into the hands of crackpots, that's how substantial their concern was that hooking their people onto life saving medicines was just another ruse by the West to poison and keep Africans down and dependent on the West. Incomprehensible. As good nationalists are wont to do, they insisted on 'local solutions', hence beetroot, garlic and lemon juice. African scientists and medical doctors standing up to them were fired and bullied sufficiently that Stalin could have taken a page from that book (Beetroot managed this without actually killing the scientists, she simple removed them from jobs and funding).

Uganda is another example. It has become clear by now, that draconian anti-gay legislation, threatening gays with the death penalty, was inspired by US evangelicals, white US evangelicals. How ironic that Africans, busily trying to assert themselves against 'evil Western values', are being goaded by other Westerners (crazy ones) to implement seriously civil rights violating policies against their own people ... bizarre stuff. The only good news is that they're being opposed frequently by younger generations of Africans who won't stand for that sort of crap.

Anyhow, Manto is gone, let's go and drink to her demise :).

Atheist bioethicists?

As most readers of this blog will know, I am an atheist. I am also a bioethicist (everyone needs a job, so don't hold that one against me), and a journal editor. I came across a semi-interesting blog entry where someone was critical of Russell Blackford and myself for 'coming out' as atheists in our book 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. The gist of the blog entry (written, I hope I'm not getting the minutiae wrong, by a woman who once was a Reverend of sorts and quit her Reverend day job because she realised that the admission of women to Reverend jobs is mistaken) was that it's a bad idea for bioethicists to admit to being non-religious. The reason given was that this would give bioethics a bad name in the USA where people don't like non-religious folks and where many have become suspicious of non-God based bioethicists anyway. My good mate, the creationist Discovery Institutes propaganda chief on bioethics, Wesley J Smith could probably take some credit for this, assuming the empirical claims made are correct to begin with. Of course, our ex-Reverend has no evidence for her claim one way or another. She may or may not be right about US Americans' attitudes to bioethicists. It's probably fair to assume that among conservative religious people like herself that view might be somewhat more prevalent. You know, the types of people who refer to married gay couples as 'family' in inverted commas, who really really really hate hate crimes legislation, and who tend to subscribe to the view that abortion is akin to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The question though is not unreasonable to ask: Should bioethicists who happen to be non-religious try to hide that view in order to avoid putting off creationists? Or even just putting off people who are vaguely religious? You can also turn that question around and ask whether bioethicists who happen to be religious should try to hide that view in order to placate non-religious people who can't handle any more 'God' business? So, if they submit an article to the journal that I edit, should they hide their views in order to make what they conclude palatable to me?

In Bioethics (one of the journals that I edit), kindly and rightly identified as a leading journal in said critical blog entry, we had articles by openly religious people arguing their case. Even stuff on a thomistic understanding of personhood (ie what someone who believes St Thomas Aquinas is a brilliant guy makes of modern notions of personhood in the context of that thinker's theology). Basically, as a journal editor you try to ensure that you're fair to content submitted to your journal. Surely that wouldn't be achieved by sending a piece that's situated in the context of Catholic moral theology to the atheist Russell Blackford for review. But that's about as far as it goes.

It's unclear though, why I as editor of the journal should not be entitled to hold my own views on the God question and why I should not be permitted to publish those views. Strategic views about the status of bioethics among evangelic Christians in the USA notwithstanding, the objective of any paper surely should be to make the strongest possible argument for one's case. Ideally you'd try to persuade both those who come from an ideological basis similar to yours, as well as those who com an entirely different angle of your views.

So, to sum up: Journal editors are entitled to hold strong views on matters affecting their field. They must not permit those views to prejudice fair process for submitted content that is in conflict with their strongly held opinions. Concerns about how that goes down with a particularly partisan section of the wider public are irrelevant.