by John F. Di Leo
Two truisms in American politics are hardly worth pointing out anymore – it’s become a given that the Democrats use Orwellian NuSpeak to obfuscate their actions, and that the "mainstream press" – the fifth columnists of the First Amendment – facilitate this NuSpeak rather than giving their readers the real news.
The decade-long debate over embryonic stem cell research is a prime example. The genuine issue is basic enough, with plenty to work out on both the political and moral sides of the argument.
But we never get to have that argument, do we? The Left has promulgated such a massive distortion of the issue that the two sides are fighting different battles: the Left pillories the Right for positions it doesn’t have, and the Right attacks the Left for positions that the public doesn’t even know are on the table.
As presented, the Left’s position seems straightforward enough:
They just want to allow science to study promising lines of research such as embryonic stem cells, a harmless form of research that may hold the answer to everything from disease to paralysis, but the Right (through their instrument George W. Bush) made such scientific study illegal for the past eight years, just because of some extremist claim of a "slippery slope." The reasonable and moderate President Obama has finally corrected this miscarriage of justice, signing an executive order on Monday, March 9, at last countermanding these extreme Bush-era restrictions.
And everybody in America and the world "knows" the above, because they’ve heard it for eight years. But not a word of it is true.
1) Embryonic stem cell research is not promising. Study after study has confirmed that embryonic stem cells are problematic in the lab. Research on adult stem cells, on the other hand, seems very promising, and has been credited to successes in recent years. This kind of research, however, gets no airplay in the political debate, because its philosophical shortcoming – a lack of dependence on destroyed embryos – robs it of partisan advantage for the abortion lobby, whose interest is clearly in promoting abortion, not curing disease and paralysis. So they intentionally confuse the two – claiming adult stem cells’ successes as victories for embryonic stem cells, appropriating them as evidence in support of an unrelated cause.
2) Embryonic stem cell research is not harmless. By definition, it is dependent upon the dissection of aborted fetuses (whether in an abortuary or in a petri dish, an unborn life, first created and then intentionally snuffed out, is an aborted fetus), and is therefore dependent upon the extinguishing of a human life. The more of an appetite there is for this kind of research, the more human embryos will have to be created and terminated to feed it.
3) President George W. Bush never banned stem cell research; in fact, his administration was very supportive of stem cell research. His administration only banned the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, on the premise that a nation whose taxpayers are principally pro-life shouldn’t allocate those tax dollars to fund a type of research that the taxpayers find abhorrent. It was never a ban on private research, just a ban on federal participation in such studies with taxpayer dollars.
4) President Bush was not an instrument of the Right. I know, this is a bit off-topic, but it’s worth mentioning anyway. There were numerous areas in which President Bush and the Right agreed, and the Right generally respects him as a decent and honorable man, but he was not, and did not govern as, a conservative. An "instrument of the Right" would not have left us with the deficit, the tax burden, the regulatory climate, the "TARP," that today constrain our economy. The positions he took, he took because believed in them, not because they helped him with his base. And where he was right, as in this case, it speaks well of his character that he tried so hard to set moral policy in line with his oath of office. But since the Left has won in its falsified version of this issue, they capitalize on the opportunity to use this false portrayal as yet another reason to paint the Right as uncaring and extremist.
5) The "slippery slope" argument is accurate, and is undeniable. When a society can produce subjects for study in the lab, and then runs out of subjects, it will produce more, lacking any legal impediment to doing so. Sixty-five years ago, this nation engaged in massive war to stop an evil regime that had so lost its soul that it produced a Josef Mengele – not just produced, but spent taxpayer funds on his "research." The United States would never sink to that level in a day or a week. But from Margaret Sanger’s "American Birth Control League" in the 1920s, to Roe v. Wade in the 1970s, to Jack Kevorkian in the 1990s… each one claiming to have some direct good as its end result… what is that progression if not a slippery slope to the dissection of tiny fetuses for lab experiments? And what will be next?
The Framers intended for our government to be moral – for our leaders to restrain their personal preferences in the exercise of their public offices, to honor the Constitution first, to seek Constitutional Amendments before allocating precious tax dollars to issues unauthorized by that august document. What we choose to do in our private life, with our personal funds, is different from what public officials may do with tax dollars.
Even if President Obama disagrees with his predecessor and with the Right on these points, he should recognize at least that is duty-bound to respect the morals of the (current) minority side, and at least split the difference: allow the disputed research to go on, but without the blessing of government through the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, as his predecessor did.
Whether you believe in a right to choose abortion in a private clinic, or to develop human clones in a lab, or to provide mercy killings in a nursing home – there can be no question that, at most, such choices should be funded by the private contributions of people who somehow manage to have no moral objection to them.
To force us all to pay for such horrors is worse than arrogance; it is the tyranny of the majority from which our Framers set out to protect us. That this issue can surface at all is proof of the failure of the Tenth Amendment; that most of our citizenry remains unaware of the truth of the matter – allowing President Obama and his supporters to gloat at the signing ceremony without fear of voter outrage, even as his signing pen draws blood – is proof of the failure of the First.
By John F. Di Leo, for the Illinois Review Copyright 2009
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and corporate trainer. A recovering politician for over a decade now, he is a former Republican county chairman of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
