The President exercised the first veto of his two terms today, and chose to act against science while upholding what he called “America’s culture of life”. This is the same “culture of life” that leads to the state-sanctioned execution of criminals, that turns an eye wounded by moral cataracts toward the bloody bombing of doctors in family planning clinics in the name of protecting a fertilized egg, that consumes violence and sex like it consumes hamburgers.
The President vetoed the scientific frontier, striking down a Congressional bill passed by both Houses of Congress that relaxes the constraints on stem cell research just a little. It was even in the right moral direction – we’re not talking about breeding humans in a controlled program for eventual destruction and harvesting of stem cells (I’ll get to that one in a moment). The bill said that fertility clinics which are imminently going to destroy unused human embryos can donate them for scientific research, thus providing a morally level source of these cells.
What the President has done today is take a “culture of life” and reduce it merely to a “cell culture”, equating the few tens of cells in a blastocyst with a sensing, functioning human being. The President’s spokesperson, Tony Snowe, criticized the criticism of the President’s record on stem cell research, noting that this President has spent more money on such research than any other. Well, that’s disingenuous for several reasons: first and foremost, this kind of research has only needed serious funding since this President took office. Second, that’s a bit like arguing that this President has spent more on scientific research than any other President, when most of that money was allocated for military R&D or Homeland Security, not basic research. Snowe might as well argue that this President has done more than any other for understanding the origin of the universe because he’s invested in faith-based programs.
After acting against basic research, the President then upheld a science fiction: he signed into law a bill that makes it illegal to grow a human to the purpose of harvesting stem cells. It is ironic, at the very least, that this President acted to make illegal a dark, Orwellian vision of the world. At the most, it is sickening that basic research and its non-glamorous sweaty labor have suffered today, while a comic-book fantasy has been made illegal.
