Yesterday John McCormack pointed out excellent stem-cell pieces by Yuval Levin and Robert George & Eric Cohen. Will Saletan’s piece in Slate also deserves to be read. Saletan is a measured proponent of embryonic stem-cell research and his piece is a caution to his confederates about not delving too far into the culture of death. I’m paraphrasing here; Saletan’s argument is actually quite nuanced. But in the course of his piece he makes a parallel between embryonic stem-cell research and torture that should make President Obama and the rest of the left uncomfortable:
On Jan. 22, Obama signed an executive order prohibiting interrogation methods used by the Bush administration to extract information from accused terrorists. “We can abide by a rule that says we don’t torture, but that we can still effectively obtain the intelligence that we need,” the president declared. “We are willing to observe core standards of conduct not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s hard.” The next day, former Bush aide Karl Rove accused Obama of endangering the country by impeding interrogations of the enemy. “They don’t recognize we’re in a war,” said Rove. “In a war, you do not take tools that are working and stop using them and say we’ll get back to you in four months, six months, eight months, a year, and tell you what we’re going to do to replace this valuable tool which has helped keep America safe.”‘ To most of us, Rove’s attack is familiar and infuriating. We believe, as Obama does, that it’s possible to save lives without crossing a moral line that might corrupt us. We reject the Bush administration’s insistence on using all available methods rather than waiting for scrupulous alternatives. We see how Rove twists Obama’s position to hide the moral question and make Obama look obtuse and irresponsible. The same Bush-Rove tactics are being used today in the stem-cell fight. But they’re not coming from the right. They’re coming from the left. Proponents of embryo research are insisting that because we’re in a life-and-death struggle-in this case, a scientific struggle-anyone who impedes that struggle by renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you’re with science, or you’re against it.
It’s a devastating pairing. Obama believes that information held by terrorists is not valuable enough to be worth sacrificing our moral heritage through water boarding; but that over-the-rainbow scientific gains, that may or may never materialize, are so valuable that all moral qualms must be absolutely set aside in their pursuit.
