ABBOTT DECRIES JUDGMENTAL MEDIA

Sydney, Aug 25 NZPA - As a debate rages in Australia over stem cell research, Health Minister Tony Abbott has hit out at what he calls the media's double standard on Christianity and politics.

Abbott is at the forefront to opposition to a parliamentary bill aimed at overturning a ban on therapeutic cloning.

Prime Minister John Howard has allowed MPs a conscience vote on the issue.

Abbott pulled no punches this week when he said lifting the ban on therapeutic cloning could lead to "human-animal hybrids".

Abbott, 48, is a Catholic, a Howard loyalist and occasionally touted as a future Liberal leader. A social conservative, he is a forceful debater on several issues, including abortion, which he opposes.

He is also a stern critic of how his religious views are interpreted in the media, as evidenced in remarks made to the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne this week about what he called the "left-liberal media mainstream" in Australia.

"A media staple since the 2004 election has been the rise of the so-called religious right.

"This motif testifies to the historical amnesia and cultural impoverishment of most younger journalists, in whose minds views that would have been orthodox a generation ago now seem odd or evidence of religious brainwashing," he said.

"I'm not aware of a single position from any politician to whom this tag is applied advocated on the basis of scripture or an appeal to religious authority.

"Every position has been argued on the basis of human values, not religious teaching. Yet it is now rare for stories about particular politicians on particular topics not to be embellished with gratuitous adjectives such as `devout Catholic'," he said in an extract published in The Australian.

Abbott noted that when some parliamentarians invoked their Christian consciences to oppose the Government's recent immigration bill, there were no calls to keep religion out of politics.

"Media outrage is confined to expressions of the church's moral teaching, not its social gospel in what is, at the very least, a chronically politically correct double standard.

"For what it is worth, I find the `Captain Catholic' tag uncomfortable because I'm no less prone to deadly sins than anyone else. I just take the church and its teaching seriously in a way that was almost universal scarcely a generation back.

"What's at work here is not just journalists' lack of understanding of the Christian culture that underpins our society, including its pluralism and separation of church and state, but their reluctance to extend a fair go to what's unfashionable.

"Australian journalism needs to be more intellectually curious and less implicitly judgmental."

On the stem cell research issue, Abbott said this week that he thought there should be no changes to current legislation which bans therapeutic cloning.

Last year, an independent review of Australia's legislation on human cloning and research involving human embryos indicated its support for therapeutic cloning and the creation and use in research of certain other types of experimental embryos in the very early stage of their development, under strict ethical and scientific regulation.

Therapeutic cloning involves injecting genetic material from a patient's cells into a human egg that has had its nucleus removed.

Embryonic stem cells are harvested from the resulting embryo and grown into lines on human connective tissue. the embryo is destroyed.

Abbott told the ABC's Insiders programme therapeutic cloning was a "slippery slope" to human cloning.

"Creating potential human life not to give life but to give the scientists a bit more of a leg up is fraught with danger," he said.

Labour's health spokeswoman, Julia Gillard, said Abbott was deliberately misleading the public on the issue.

"I think Tony Abbott as health minister has actually got an obligation to keep the debate calm and keep it focused on the facts," she told Network Ten.

"Instead he believes it is his job to run in with the most inflammatory language he can think of.

"No one in federal Parliament is advocating human cloning, that is, the complete reproduction of human beings.

"For Tony Abbott to talk about that as sort of Dolly the sheep cloning, which is the kind of terminology he's used, is calculated in my view to misinform the public."

Many scientists believe therapeutic cloning holds great promise for sufferers of diabetes, Alzheimer's, motor neurone disease and other illnesses.

The bill is likely to be debated in Parliament in October.