With President Bush's 1st ever veto today (veto'ing the use of embryos that would otherwise get freezer-burn & be discarded because if they weren't already going to be thrown away they could possibly become human life) I'm reminded more than ever of the Reverend Bill Hick's prematurely praising Jesus that the conservative Christians were out of office (that was in the beginning of the Clinton era).
If only there was someone to actually vote for instead of voting with these folks to avoid putting statists in power.... urg.
18 comments:
I feel that you are off the mark on this one. Bush didn't veto the use of embryos that would be discarded; he veto'd the use of federal funds to harvest and use embryos that would be discarded. This is an important distinction.
Nothing in the bills put forth make even a token attempt to say "Embryo Farms are Bad". If the bill were to be passed as written, there would be absolutely nothing to stop the mass-harvesting of embryos for stem cell research. If the embryos are going to be discarded anyway, is this a bad thing? Perhaps not..
But do we really want the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT funding one side of such a issue? This is not a case of civil rights or providing a guarantee of equal protection; it is an extremely divisive issue on which I believe the Federal government should NOT intervene.
Bush may (and let's face it, did) have chosen to oppose this bill because he knows that abortion clinics would be the principle suppliers of such embryos for reasons dictated by his religious ideology. That doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people in our country, myself included, who cringe at even the potential idea of 'embryo farms'.
Add to that some common-sense facts:
1. Bush is the first POTUS to provide Federal funding of ANY sort for stem-cell research. Clinton refused (See: http://clinton6.nara.gov/1994/12/1994-12-02-president-on-nih-and-human-embryo-research.html), giving virtually the exact same arguments that Bush did. So why is everyone bashing Bush and not Clinton?
2. Popular Science has been tracking stem cell research for 20 years now. A few months ago they interviewed the man (name eludes me) who is essentially the father of the research movement. He is very angry about the way the research is being portrayed and wanted to make it clear that *NOT ONE* medical advance has come about from over 25 years of stem cell research. In fact, he bluntly said that the research, while interesting and opening up new areas and ideas (such as leukemia research), has failed to produce even a single success in ANY form. Not one regrown organ, not one spinal column reconnected, not one debilitating disease reversed in even one lab rat in over 25 years of study. To paraphrase his words (I'll try to find you the article), people are getting blinded by the idea of stem-cell research and completely ignoring the reality.
3. Bush's veto would not apply to federal funding of stem cells taken from cadavers (not regarded as a good source) or taken from a Mother's cord-blood immediately post-pregnancy (regarded as an excellent, and possibly the best, source).
This issue is far too complicated and important to be treated so dismissively as "Christians are against knowledge". That is ridiculous. The pursuit of knowledge does not mean that you throw any shred of ethics and morals out the window.
And frankly why are we, as Libertarians, even debating this? Issues this divisive are precisely what government should NOT be taking a stance on, even if you ignore the massive amount of private funding that is available and pouring in to this research. I am sick to pieces of the governmment being looked at as the source of all money and services. We are not going to reverse this by tacking on even more bloated programs.
/opinion
And keep in mind, I'm basically pro-choice.
I think Jim's just obsessed...
Part of the opposition to this is our ability to harvest embryonic stem cells without actually harming embryos. So why use federal money to support something that is morally shady and medically -- so far -- a pipe dream? If the companies had anything to show for it, private funds would be available...
Well, I agree that, really, the government shouldn't be funding ANY of this, but so long as it is....
And, when I cite the cartoon above, wholly out of its context, btw, I'm not saying that Christians are against Knowledge. I know a lot of very knowledgeable Christians whose learning I have a lot of respect for (Kevin Menard and Swapna Mathew immediately come to mind); this doesn't extend to evangelicals like Bush.
The issue here is that the way the law works, if I donate $150k to this endevor, existing labs can't use it without serious risk of losing all their federal funding -- you'd have to build a new lab from scratch that hadn't had any federal funding in order to do so (otherwise, the lawyers have assured the biologists, they're using federal funds to do so -- at least in this case. IANAL here, but I've been following the debates on California's misbegotten stem-cell research program).
I regard it as both bad policy AND a cookie for his evangelical constituency. I don't think that any purely scientific discovery will immediately cure anything -- that's not the way that things work. It takes years to develop & test animal models for things before you even begin with human trials -- part of why I regard CAs initiative as misbegotten. We *could* have a policy that supports harvesting from umbilicals and from some section of unused embryos, something developed as a result of rational ethics. Instead we have folks deciding that something is morally unacceptible, walling it off from debate, when I don't see that it's really that different than life-insurace policies (profiting from someone's demise) & harvesting organs for transplant (profiting from someone's demise). There's a counter-argument that in these cases the demise has already occurred -- we could have a debate about whether or not all potential human life should be preserved regardless of its probability of ever living, but instead we get knee-jerk morality.
Oh, Russ: I'm not obsessed -- I'm super-jaded and bitter. I simply can't stand the invalidation of reason by morality. I'm not a rationalist (I don't have enough faith for that), and, in general, I'd really rather keep the many good things we get from living in a generally Christian society with its emphasis on personal responsibility and the worth/dignity of the individual. But I'm so sick of evangelicals, charismatics, dispensationalists and all their fideistic ilk that I could just vomit.
Bush being an Evangelical doesn't mean that every decision he makes is a sap to the base; particularly when his base isn't even particularly 'activated' over this issue.. Again, Clinton opposed essentially the same bill for essentially the same reason. Why then does Bush's logic have to be based on his Evangelism when Clinton's was not?
Granted, when Bush passed the stem cell funding originally, he had a stronger base support he didn't need to sop to, but I do think its possible that his object is based on something other than knee-jerk evangelism..
Well, I'm ignorant of any stands Clinton may have taken on the issue; I was more upset with Clinton for his "just send a missile" diplomacy in the Sudan. If this were the only thing of Bush's, I wouldn't react so strongly. But this, following on the heels of "teach both sides of the debate" regarding evolution/Paley's thesis, just stuck in my craw.
Yes, Jim, but you're simply Bashing Bush for being an evangelical. Even your defenses are, I'm sorry to say, based on issues that are totally separate.
First, freezer-burn is pithy, but falls apart when GWB is on-stage with babies who came from the same embryos...
Second, respecting somebody for their learning shouldn't be a factor of what religious denomination they adhere to. For all his many, many, many faults, GWB is known to be reasonably-widely read for an MBA type. Why is his learning worth less than Kevin's or Swapna's?
Third, If you donate 150 bucks to ANY research, that is a separate issue from the federal-funds research. Federal-funds research is totally segregated from privately-supported research, all the way down to the pipettes (this was confirmed on ATC yesterday by the guy who wrote the bill)... you're blaming Bush's evangelical base for a long-standing accounting mechanism designed to make sure that folks getting our tax money can't cook the books when it comes time to account for how they spent it.
I can find nothing in your logic that doesn't boil down to "I hate evangelicals."
Point one: there's gotta be a shelf-life, past which the embryo is still useable for research, but isn't a viable child any more.
Point two: Neither Kevin nor Swapna think that evolution and religion are in conflict. Perhaps he's widely read, but selectively so in areas I personally care about.
Point three: there's nothing that says I can't donate money to contribute to research in a lab that's also doing more of the same research -- only if it's a different study or federal funds have been outlawed is that true.
And finally, I thought that you of all people would have recognized my use of the term "dispepsia" in the title of the post. You widely confess to being "dispepsic" on a different issue. The nerve wasn't meant to be struck, just "thwipped" lightly.
Still, everything you say boils down to "the mere existence of these people offends me." Otherwise, why not lobby for a change in federal accounting procedure? I'm certainly not an evangelical, but I can see the merit in not spending government-coerced taxpayer money on something that has a) demonstrated complete medical futility and b) has some truly serious ethical issues attached to it...
Equally, just because I go "eww" on the detailed notion of homosexual sex is not the same as drawing an equivalence to what you're writing. For starters, first I'd have to give a crap about whether somebody's gay or not. Since I'm married, nonissue. Second, I'd have to lump every gay and lesbian I know into a bucket with the "we think HIV is a badge of sexual-identity-honor nutjobs." Sorry, but sexual-orientation bigot I ain't. Save that for the Phelps crowd -- the sort of fundies worth going after (and who, btw, make 99.44% of all other evangelicals puke).
Jim: I don't find your arguments as hollow as Russ is making them out. You make some interesting points with the comparison to insurance and reaping a benefit from someone's demise. Now, I would state that the difference is that a lot of people see the comparison as more akin to getting a life insurance policy on someone and then murdering them for the benefit. I don't share this view myself but I recognize it.
In your followup you refer to a shelf-life. People like Bush reject this idea since the embryos could eventually be used to make a viable child. One thing that complicates this is that if there is a shelf-life, it is a tremendously long one. There is so little organic material involved here and it is kept in deep freeze. From what I understand, these embryos can last literally decades with no deterioration.
Nevertheless, the argument is not 'pithy', nor does it fall apart, since shelf-life is not really the issue here. The issue is that the embryos in question are destined for the medical waste disposal unit. Facilities maintain extremely tight controls on these things; embryos extracted during an abortion are never going to wind up in a fertility clinic. The ones that Bush refers to are typically the extras that are saved from an in-vitro fertilization in case the couple decides they want more (or the in-vitro doesn't take). So, in this are, Bush's argument falters. It is not defeated, however, since by and large this issue comes back to the simple "are embryos 'life'?" question, which no one can answer.
And is exactly why I don't want the Fed involved.
You are both right on the funding issue. It is a question of line-items and accounting practice. Many research facilities (both medical and not) that are run by private companies are very carefully constructed and recorded on the books with monies that have no Federal background. Now, logically one could say "Well that's sort of moot since if the Fed gives you $50k for something else, that frees up $50k for you to spend on your building".. And one would be right.. Accounting-wise, though, it is world's apart.
Say I build a research lab with 'private' monies. I then decide to host some private research projects as well as some publicly-funded ones. Some of my private research will be in areas that the Fed is not supportive of or is not allowed to finance.
So, what I will do is keep careful track of every dime the Fed sends me. I will make sure that every cent goes only to the Fed projects. I will purchase pipettes and beakers and such with that money and store them in an area accessible only for Fed projects. If a privately funded project runs out of beaker stoppers and asks if a Fed project can spare one, that Fed project worker will say no. No exceptions.
In doing so, I keep the atomicity of the public and private projects. If the Fed audits me, I can show them exactly where their money went and that it didn't ever touch anything it shouldn't, down to the beaker.
Now where Jim is right is that if the Fed helped subsidize the construction of the lab itself, it all goes out the window. That lab cannot be used for any project that is ineligible for federal funding until it has been fully depreciated to $0. Until a building is depreciated, it is considered that the purchaser is still 'conveying value' if you will, so it would mean that the Fed is in effect funding everything that happens within it. At the end of depreciation, typically the Fed will simply sign the building off the books.
That's not phrased as well as it could be but you get the point.
"Still, everything you say boils down to "the mere existence of these people offends me."
No it doesn't. You're doing the same thing to Jim that he is doing in places to Bush. His arguments about insurance and the impact on private research of stem cells within a govt-funded lab are valid concerns that should not be discounted even if his principle problem is that Bush the Evangelical is using his religious beliefs to badly shape policy.
And frankly, I don't think that's an invalid concern given the things Bush has tried to get passed. I never said in my posts that I don't think that's what he's doing; I merely raised the question as I don't think it takes an Evangelical to have some serious reservations about this.
"Otherwise, why not lobby for a change in federal accounting procedure?"
Because that's far beyond the scope of the discussion
Superbiff: bingo
Russ: my squink (technical term) is exactly analogous -- I don't care that evangelicals exist, I just can't stand the way they think. Different activity, but same discomfort. If evangelicals want to clap their hands and sing their songs in the privacy of their own churches, in parks during birthday get-togethers or after-hours on the school playground, that's just fine with me. But when you make public policy decisions based on fideism, I get major dispeptic heebie-jeebies. Federal public policy inherently involves me, and I don't want them making decisions that affect me any more than you want to attend the bath house on Market Street. What a person thinks is one thing; the force of the Federal Executive is quite another.
Follow-up: just wanting to emphasize that it's not that they have a problem with the whole embryo-research thing. As Superbiff said, valid questions do exist, and I'm not necessarily in favor of all the possibilities (embryo-farming, for example). But they're applying the broadsword of morality to the issue, rendering it un-debateable. If there are Christian-led inputs to a discussion of the ethics of the issue, that's different, because we get to employ our reason. But by casting the shadow of morality over it, you get Federal policy that amounts to "because daddy said so". Thus, we all become subject to the religious particulars of the current office-holder (whom I disapprove of on multiple grounds (although he's still a better choice than Kerry)).
Yeah, dude, but you are still asserting what you ought to be proving: that the decision is based on fideism. To pull an orthogonal example out of a hat, there are tons of mainstream Catholics who agree with this position -- religious, yes, but not Fideist as you use the term.
(Be careful with that, btw... the best translation for that would be "believing," which puts you into very different territory...) =O
I follow what you're saying, but its not the POTUS' job to hold a big debate on the issue. It's his job to sign or veto it b/c he feels strongly that it doesn't address a concern of a large enough segment of the populace..
If he vetos then its the legislatures job to go back and redesign the bill so as to find a compromise. This bill could (and will, I think) be tweaked fairly easily to make it such that he won't veto it.
Russ, you're right that I'm asserting it, not proving it. But this's just a blog with my personal dispepsia on it....
I honestly expected maybe a comment or two, tops, not anything close to the reaction gotten. :-)
For the record, there's like almost a half-dozen posts in there that I couldn't see when writing my replies... Superbiff, yeah, I buy those arguments.
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