Ambassador Says Bangladesh Is Example of Harmony

THE DAILY STAR (Bangladesh), Oct. 2 — As he completed his assignment as Vatican ambassador to Bangladesh, Joseph Adams called that country an “excellent example of religious and communal harmony in the world,” according to The Daily Star newspaper in Bangladesh.

He praised the government for its role in promoting interethnic and interreligious amity in a part of the world that sees much strife. Adams called his six years in Bangladesh the “golden time” of his life.

Bangladesh president Dr. Iajuddin Ahmed cited the work of the Pope, who has visited Bangladesh in the past, in fostering peace, tolerance and compassion around the world — especially between members of religious groups that have historically been hostile toward each other.

Bangladesh is a Muslim enclave in the Indian subcontinent, created as part of Pakistan during the bloody postwar partition of Britain's former colony. It later won independence after a destructive civil war.

Marriage Helps Men and Women Alike

LIFESITE NEWS (www.lsn.ca), Oct. 4 — For some 30 years researchers have believed that marriage benefits men more than women. Feminist research in the early 1970s suggested that marriage was a patriarchal institution, created for and mainly benefiting men. But a recent, exhaustive study in Australia suggests both sexes find emotional and psychological advantages to those who marry as opposed to those who remain single.

The study covered 10,641 adults who took part in the 1996 Australian national survey of mental health. Psychologist David de Vaus of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, wrote of the results in the winter issue of Family Matters. He said it is “unequivocal” that, “when a range of types of mental disorders are considered, marriage reduces the risk of mental disorders for both men and women.”

Ban Designer Children?

DAILY TELEGRAPH (United Kingdom), Oct. 4 — A think tank in the United Kingdom has suggested a ban on genetic manipulation and selective abortion employed to create children with higher IQs, or a reduced propensity for crime, according to the London Daily Telegraph.

Published in the current issue of Genetics and Human Behaviour, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent research institute, linked such efforts with the discredited “science” of eugenics.

Chief of the Nuffield Council, professor Bob Hepple, told the Daily Telegraph: “This is a potentially explosive area. The subject has an ugly history.” He went on to call abortions carried out based on genetic information about a child's likely intelligence or behavior “morally unacceptable.”

He also suggested that criminal justice could be disrupted if defendants began to cite their genetic predispositions to anti-social behavior as factors mitigating their personal responsibility.