You know how we often hear the term “the liberal elite” which connotes some ivory tower intellectual superiority? It might only be I who thinks such a term is rather an oxymoron. This great article on discoveries in stem cell research reminds me of the same liberal forces of the last two decades that have argued that ending life in the womb is “a right” while at the same time suing drunk drivers that cause accidents resulting in the death of a fetus.
This entire Wall Street Journal Op/Ed piece is outstanding and is a must-read for any conservative. Link —–> Trading Places — Will the secular left soon attack the religious right for being pro-science? — BY JOSEPH BOTTUM
Or, maybe, the argument is just beginning, for this news turns on its head everything in what the nation’s newspapers have delivered to us as a story of blinkered pro-lifers vs. courageous scientists.
The people who turn out actually to have believed in the power of science are the pro-lifers–the ones who said that a moral roadblock is not, in point of fact, an outrageous hindrance, for scientists will always find another, less-objectionable way to achieve their goals. President Bush’s refusal of federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines didn’t halt major stem-cell advances, any more than the prohibition against life-threatening research on human subjects, such as the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, stopped the advance of medical treatments.
For those who attacked the pro-lifers in the name of science, however, things look a little different. As Maureen L. Condic explained to First Thigns readers this year in her careful survey, “What We Know About Embryonic Stem Cells,” the promises of medical breakthroughs were massively overblown by the media.
But there were reasons for all the hype. I have long suspected that science, in the context of the editorial page of the New York Times, was simply a stalking-horse for something else. In fact, for two something-elses: a chance to discredit America’s religious believers, and an opportunity to put yet another hedge around the legalization of abortion. After all, if our very health depends on the death of embryos, and we live in a culture that routinely destroys early human life in the laboratory, no grounds could exist for objecting to abortion.
With these purposes now severed by the Japanese de-differentiation technique, which way will it break?
The answer is, quite possibly, toward a rejection of science by the mainstream press. Since the 1960s, abortion has skewed American politics in strange and unnatural ways, and the cloning debates are no exception. Recently John Tierney of the New York Times had a long article called “Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion.” It’s a little unfortunately timed, given the news from England about Mr. Wilmut’s change of heart, but the theme is that American Christians and European post-Christians are unlike the Chinese, Koreans and other Easterners with no history of opposition to science.
The whole idea seems more than a little peculiar, when one reflects on the birthplaces of modern science. And yet, Mr. Tierney sees something that is, from his perspective, genuinely hard to explain: The left in America and Europe supports destructive embryonic research, while it increasingly rejects genetically modified “Frankenfoods.”
Shake loose from the narrative of antiscience fundamentalists and pro-science liberals, however, and a different story starts to be visible. Abortion skewed the political discussion of all this, pinning the left to a defense of science it doesn’t actually hold. The more natural line is agitation against Frankenfoods and all genetic modification, particularly given the environmentalism to which the campaign against global warming is tying the left.
Narratives about positions on public policy are like enormous steamships: It takes a long time to turn them around. But if the news of stem-cell breakthroughs prove accurate, we may well see over the next few years a gradual reversal in news stories and editorials. Watch for it, now that abortion is out of the equation: much less hype about all the miracle cures that stem cells will bring us, more suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution that may result, and just about the same amount of bashing of religious believers–this time for their ignorant support of science.
Oh, the wonder of the fluid logic of the elite liberal mind!
~ Vic
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“The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Anglo-Irish dramatist and wit (1856-1950)
