The article is about using a ban on cloning as a tactic. Kass says in the article that his broader aim is to block technologies that transform the human condition, and that he sees a cloning ban as the opening gambit most likely to succeed. He aims to use State force to deprive other people of the right to use their own bodies as they see fit. Yes, Kass does attack individual liberty. Reread Kass's list of technologies that he dislikes again. Viagra? Prozac? Mechanical prostheses? Organ transplants? I hope Kass finds himself in need of every technology he disparages.

Most of what this guy writes looks like complete bunk and he fails to make good aruments (in some cases none, as if he assumes his philosophy is that shared by the world) to back up what he claims.

Excellent point. Kass expects everyone to agree with his gut reactions from square one. Well, I for one do not. I have no revulsion towards clones – but a great deal towards Kass.

Kass frets that oh-my-god-social-relationships-might-change if reproduction were less of a lottery: the horror, the horror!

To put my cards a bit more visibly on the table: Reproductive cloning, in and of itself, is a nit. It is fundamentally a conservative option, adding a copy of an existing genome to the next generation, minutely slowing down genetic change.

Genetic engineering, on the other hand, has the potential to be a big win. Natural reproduction juggles genes at random. It is a crapshoot, and frankly, a lousy one. Around 30% of fetuses are defective enough to spontaneously abort. And then there are the defective ones that make it to term… There are damn good reasons for looking at nature and saying: This part of the human condition should be changed.

With obvious screening techniques (gene sequencing, looking for known bad alleles, plus additional techniques that we cannot yet forsee) we can clearly do better than that. With techniques to insert known-good genes, doctors will be able to offer parents yet better options.

Over the long haul, engineering can always do better than fixed human biology, because engineering can use every trick our bodies use, then apply human ingenuity to add more.

Engineering is better than rolling dice – except to someone like Kass who would rather see everyone else as powerless serfs, bowing down to his choice of gods. Human will is better than being enslaved to chance.

In the article, he explicitly says that cloning is a "golden opportunity" to start banning transforming technologies. The implication that I read is that Kass has a long list of technologies he wants to ban, and cloning is just a starting point. I read his list of technologies that I quoted as ones that he would have wanted to erect Berlin Walls against; to forcibly stop other people from using, but which he recognizes he is mostly too late to stop.

Everyone is free to speak in this country, but when a klansman or Kass speaks, they defile the freedom they use because they use their freedom to deny it to others.

Hmm, I think I feel a bit like Kadamose at the moment; how did this get to be insightful? Mark, all you've done is call me a name. The fact is, pro human thinking is closed minded because it fails to realize potentials that could help humanity. Pro human thinking is observer based, but AIs, for example, don't think this way, so pro human thinking about AIs thus leads to misunderstanding them and a failure to develop them to their full potential. Secondly, you have said I have a disorder because I'm not interested in humanity? What is this. I have an interest in myself, not what happens to this species. I'm not going to do anything to hurt humanity, but I'm certainly not busy trying to help make it better, either, just trying to make me better. If that's a mental disorder, then we had better lock up billions of people.

I did not read this paragraph as a call to suppress all of the things listed, but as an invocation of the rapid and transformative changes brought on by new technology; the implication being that at some point all of this can and will cross boundaries that we should rather not cross. Kass does not, in this article at least, call for banning anything but cloning. I don't know about his larger views; I suppose if he is writing in TNR he is probably fairly conservative, but I agree with him on this one.

Here are your facts:

Kass writes, disapprovingly of

Some transforming powers [which] are already here. The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Bottled embryos. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic screening. Genetic manipulation. Organ harvesting. Mechanical spare parts. Chimeras. Brain implants. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone.

Kass is a repulsive enemy of many freedoms, not solely reproductive freedoms. Look at that list again: He attacks the freedom to not reproduce, the freedom to be healed, the freedom to regain one's sexuality or to free one's mind from depression.

He is using cloning as the edge of a wedge, as an opportunity to use a badly informed public's queasiness to block any technological innovations that promise "fundamental changes in human nature" (Kass's own words), no matter how beneficial the change may be. Do you wonder that many of us view Kass with revulsion?

This article is about cloning. It has little to do with any other issues, although he puts the cloning issue in the context of a larger battle against "a post-human future." I don't know what you mean by

The fact that Kass uses the reproductive issue as an argument to limit our freedoms in other ways

Do you have a quote from the article to support this "fact"?

Kass cites libertarian ideas as one factor biasing against a cloning ban, but I didn't see any broader "attack on individual liberty." The article is about cloning.