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EXPLANATORY
NOTES REGARDING OUR "CLONE DIANA " COMMEMORATIVE ACTION IN CENTRAL
PARK, NYC, SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 14,1997
"Personalizing" an
issue requires putting a human face on it. After an initial burst of
publicity stretching from USA Today to the New York Sunday Times Magazine in
the spring of 1997, the debate about cloning human beings disappeared from
view.
We wondered how to raise an
issue so misunderstood in a positive framework.
We’d been touched by how Princess Diana had raised the world’s
consciousness about land mines around the world.
When New York City and the
Episcopal Church announced a memorial service for Diana in Central Park, we
decided to issue the first commemorative badge in the world in her honor.
The picture of that badge,
both the front and the (more important) wording on the back, can be seen in
our photo gallery. The detailed
story of that demonstration can be found in the GayToday cloning archives.
This was putting a new,
widely loved face on the issue of cloning a human being.
It was not a serious demonstration “asking” she be cloned.
It was a “commemorative” event.
What greater tribute could be paid to someone than to say:
“You’re too special to totally lose.
You deserve to be cloned.”
We also wondered what the
public reaction would be? The
vast majority of the public was supposedly “against the cloning of any
human being.” We believed
that this resulted from science fiction nonsense like the movie “Boys from
Brazil” which focused on cloning little Hitler's to run the world.
From the moment our first
poster went into our storefront window, people commenced coming in,
congratulating us on “the beautiful tribute we’d done for Diana.”
We knew that we well receive a lot of support and certainly a lot of
publicity for the cause by going up to Central Park and distributing 5000 of
these badges for free.
Indeed, human cloning was
overwhelmingly embraced once Diana’s face (instead of Hitler’s) was put
on it. Reading this story is
truly an adventure—the first true commemoration through cloning, an
experiment in public social psychology and, yes, admittedly a brazen
publicity stunt.
It would be an issue for
Diana’s family to decide. This
will be an issue many of you reading this today may have to decide regarding
a lost loved one.
But read the text on the
badge’s back carefully: “Cloning
cannot restore a lost personality…”
We do not advocate cloning as a pathway to immortality.
At best, as will be elaborated upon beyond the text of the badge, it
would only “deny death its traditional totality.”
At most, it would bestow a “temporary, partial immortality” on
the genotype, the special formula of the individual involved.
But, before you point the
obvious, the very term “partial, temporary immortality” is an oxymoron.
That means the term itself is a contradiction in terms, like a
description of whitish blackness or brilliant idiot.
Then again, “idiot savant” comes to mind.
More later.
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