President Bush's compromise
townhall.com
On the surface, President Bush's
decision to allow for limited federal
funding of research on 60 genetically diverse
stem cell lines that "already exist " and have
"already been destroyed" seems reasonable.
But to anyone who has taken a course in
logic or philosophy, Bush has opened a door,
however reluctantly, that will not again be
closed.
He has established - morally, politically and
ethically - the principle that it is permissible to
experiment on a living component of the
human race, even for the presumed benefit of
other members of the human race. As The
Family Research Council's Ken Connor noted,
this is the "fruit of the poisoned tree. Courts
have long held that to allow government to
benefit from a wrongful act provides an
unhealthy incentive to persist in such acts."
We have been persisting in such acts since
the wrongful act of Roe vs. Wade, 28 years
ago. If the government can fund these
"limited experiments," what is to stop
government from unlimited experiments? Only
more pressure from science, more parades
of the sick and disabled before Congress and
more morally (and legally) vacuous rulings by
the Supreme Court, all of which are coming.
A number of members of Congress have
already said they will introduce legislation to
open the experimental stem cell door even
wider.
Like the European Jews whose destiny was
sealed when they had the misfortune to live
under the boot of Adolph Hitler, the fate of
millions of unborn babies was determined
when they had the bad luck to be conceived
in the anti-life era that officially began in 1973
with Roe vs. Wade, but had its roots in an
anti-God culture which began decades earlier.
A nation that will not protect babies at the moment of their birth
is not likely to acquire a latent morality on the way to
exterminating them at ever-earlier stages. Europe, which has
for decades outpaced the United States in secularism and the
horrors that have flowed from that philosophy, openly
speculates about which nation will host the scientists who will
first clone humans.
The New York Times editorializes against cloning, but that
newspaper, which regularly endorses abortion for any reason
and at any stage, long ago gave up any right to be heard on this
subject. President Bush, too, opposes cloning, but that
opposition will be seen as one man's sentimentality. We are
now viewed as complex machines to be dissected and used for
whatever purpose the majority may wish.
During last year's campaign, candidate George W. Bush
courageously advanced many arguments in favor of life. He did
the same in his Thursday night speech, but he reached a
conclusion not based on his pro-life position. He adopted the
"potential for life" argument that undermines his own stated
convictions. Such a view weakens a pro-life position because it
allows those already born to impart value to the life of another
simply by stating, without any anchor in objective truth, who has
a right to live and who does not.
What and who is next? Can anyone stop this? If so, on what
basis? If we can steal the essential elements of life from others
not yet born, why not exterminate those at the other end of life?
Why not kill the elderly and the infirm when they have become a
"burden" on Social Security and Medicare, on society, or even
on relatives eager to access an estate before much of it goes
for long-term care?
Now that they have abandoned any pretense about the
uniqueness of human life, what is to prevent scientists, ethicists
and even some of the useful idiot clergy from signing off on
euthanasia, though in Orwellian style they will call it something
else, lest our darkened souls see any light.
It's over now. Science has declared itself God. And government
is its high priest. Let us worship, or else. The "or else" may
come anyway because others have now acquired the right to
decide the conditions under which you will be permitted to
continue your life or whether, for the supposed "good" and
"benefit" of others, you will have to die. |
