Bioethical controversies often generate heated language — often more heated than enlightened. This extract from a press release issued by the Libertarian Alliance, which describes itself as “Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute” is a particularly splendid instance of fustian diathermancy (hot air):

Human embryos and tissue are the property of human beings, not resources to be controlled by arrogant moralisers and the alleged “great and the good” in state socialist bureaucracies… The opponents of cloning, an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalist lunatics and the green slime of environmentalists and anti-scientific and anti-capitalist primitivists, are an axis of evil, whose predictable reactionary moaning and groaning should be dismissed as the ranting nonsense it is…

Life, liberty, property, scientific and industrial progress, and the abolition of illness, death and taxes are the axis of human values. The reactionary opponents of cloning, and the despotic and arrogant Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority who would seek to control or restrict it, are the voice of anti-life values and the culture of death.

IN BRIEF: initiative