Stem Cell Veto Sticks
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Money, Religion, ScienceBush’s first veto as POTUS will keep the “culture of life” crowd happy, millions of cells safe and will prevent other ontold millions from realizing a better life.
WASHINGTON – The House on Wednesday failed to muster enough votes to override President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand federally funded embryonic stem cell research.Backers of the bill, approved by the House a year ago with a strong bipartisan margin, and the Senate on Tuesday, did not get the two-thirds vote necessary to override Bush’s first in more than five years in the White House.
Bush on Wednesday rejected the legislation that could have multiplied the federal money going into embryonic stem cell research, making an emotionally charged life-and-death issue the first veto of his presidency.
This vote is based on religion, pure and simple. We have a President who’s doing nearly anything he can to overturn Roe v. Wade and this veto is merely an extension of that philosophy.
My apologies to the millions worldwide who could benefit from advanced stem cell treatment. Our country has once again let you down. Am I being dramatic? I don’t think so, because if we consider ourselves the World’s police, we should also be thinking about protecting people from the microscopic tyrants as well.
Simply put, we have no problem pouring untold billions into going into Iraq, bombing the hell out of that country and killing thousands of innocents, but all of a sudden our morality kicks in when it comes to developing technology that will absolutely help so many more people than our foreign policy ever will? To me, that makes no sense and it speaks to the inherent flaw with the religious politics of this administration.
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July 22nd, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Vegetarians are Nazis, pure and simple. Hitler didn’t eat meat.
July 22nd, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I’m not even sure where to start with this post, as it seems be an impressionist hoch-poch of Chomskyite post-modern grievances – one thing not necessarily connected to the next – a time-capsule of progressivist frustration and self-righteousness leading into straight-up angry delusion.
Damn these cell lovers! I hear your cry. We would all be safe under Bush if we lived in a petri dish. Damn this opiate of religion! and this Dead God it espouses. Our Country has again let you down, World. More specifically, our God has killed you! Sealed your fate. Feel lucky you are not one of the innocents that we have choosen to kill straight out with bombs and bullets. We will save the ammo and let our miscroscopic tyrants do our dirty work.
Dude, one word….Klonopin.
July 22nd, 2006 at 1:15 pm
My argument is solid and points out a very obvious flaw in the logic of this administration. Save cells, but don’t save the lives of millions who are suffering. And what do I get in response? Nazis and Chomsky? And I’m the one who needs medication?
If this administration truly cared about “freedom”, they’d do everything in their power to give those who are suffering needlessly the means to do so. And that’s regardless of whether they’re under the thumb of some tin-pot despot or at the mercy of their own flawed genetics. This veto is a smack in the face of people everywhere who could benefit from our research but are being turned away because of religious ideals. Sad indeed.
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:17 pm
You should check out the Daily Show segment on it (go to comedycentral.com) where Jon Stewart gets as close to an outright editorial as he ever does. It interperses Bush/Snow’s comments about stem cells (how every life is important and letting even one be destroyed to help the general populace is a path we can’t go down) with their comments about Iraq (tens of thousands of people getting killed is a small price to pay for a free society). I think it was very effective because it even sidestepped the argument about whether a couple cells are individuals or not and highlighted Bush’s incoherence on utilitarian grounds.
I’ll also have to say that I think a lot of resistance is not necessarily about the destruction of the embryos (especially since they are going to be destroyed anyway) but more about a fear that we are playing God. If we unlock the “magic” of stem cells, they we truly will understand how life is created and develops at the most intrinsic level. I think this is what is truly terrifying to many people both religious and not.
July 22nd, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Terrifying? Mikkel, I honestly don’t think that’s it. They think it’s murder, plain and simple. Bush has stated this and Tony Snow restated it recently. But what I don’t get is that they don’t look at the innocents we’ve killed in Iraq as murder. That’s just collateral damage.
I don’t know, the type of moral equivalence we’re dealing with right now is pretty weird.
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:34 pm
I think there is a difference between the rationalization for a line of thought and the root cause. The British science magazine The New Scientist had a commemoration of the birth of Dolly recently and a scientist they interviewed said he felt like the worst thing that happened to the stem cell cause was that the groundbreaking paper was released shortly after the announcement of Dolly. This invariably linked “therapeutic” cloning with full animal cloning. I remember a lot of religious people claiming that Dolly was just one sign of the coming Apocalypse because it showed we could completely usurp God. They felt like the last real domain of God was the creation of life and we were now meddling in that. The interviewee said that if only stem cell research had come out a few years before Dolly, the controversy would probably not exist.
I find it suspicious that no one has attacked the process of in vitro fertilization as being murder because that undoubtedly kills a very very large percentage of embryos that are created. Considering that the abortion/stem cell rhetoric claims life begins at conception, that implies we have another “silent holocaust” surrounding fertilization clincs, but you don’t see anyone picketing them. I have come to the conclusion that this must be because IVF is more or less still according to God’s Plan in that it involves undirected fertilization. I believe it is the demystifying of life that many religious people find so scary and yes, sinful. Even the Catholic Church has alluded to such when supporting the concept of Darwinian Evolution but denouncing “chaos.” The Church, presented with an extraordinary amount of supporting evidence, was forced to accept that there is macro evolution driven by natural selection, but still needed to reassert that in the end God is the one that has a Plan and all life is subserviant to that. The idea of randomness and life thriving because of chaos is nihilistic and destroys any respect for God. In fact, they even connected the general theme to abortion, stem cell research and (of all things) gay marriage. The “Culture of Death” was turning away from God and becoming arrogant.
I’ve always found the Catholics to share many of the same basic tenets/concerns as Bush’s “base” when it comes to these issues, but far more intent on laying an intellectual foundation. By casting dissent to such technologies in the light of a basic sin that everyone agrees on (murder) it simplifies the debate to gather both support and feint against the opposition. Everyone agrees that murder is wrong and so by using the rhetoric that Bush et al. are using, they have us aruging about whether or not the cells constitute a human being. This is something that comes down to a matter of belief. Convince people that it is life and they will not question the policies that dictates. The opposition can use all the facts and utilitarian arguments they want, but it reduces down to a shouting match of “it’s not a human” “yes it is” “no it’s not!” “yes it is!” that will never be resolved. This successfully squelches any serious conversation about whether Man is playing God and the pandora’s box of subtleties that opens (forced life support anyone?)
I’m not sure whether all of this is a concious ploy or not, but I do think it is a case of something I have grown increasingly interested in. In logic, there are axioms (basic building blocks of truth) and derived conclusions. Logic — and therefore debate — is almost entirely centered around the derived conclusions and how they are formed. A logical person might be convinced to change views because they see a flaw in their derivation. However, holding different axioms leads to different conclusions and discourse these days revolves around arguing who has the “better” axioms and attempting to use logic to prove that (which is against the whole theory). Frame conflict in terms of axioms (supporting the President is always right, life begins at conception, etc) and “debate” will lead to polarization and a hardening of stances. This is precisely what the “religious right” and “looney left” led by the President have done.
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
1) All the potential benefits of embryonic stem cells can be achieved by adult stem cells, or placental, or umbilicus cells. (in fact, diseases like paralysis, parkinsons and diabetes are already being treated by adult stem cells, not a single disease has been treated with embryos.)
2)It is not self evident that an embryo is not a human being. The only legal crieterion that has been established regarding the definition of life was decided by 6 unelected individuals in 1973. Their definition of a human being starts as a foetus that is “viable outside the womb, albeit with medical assistance.” What stone tablet is that carved into and what mountain did they carry it down from? Why can’t ‘we the people’ decide if an embryo, a zygote, a blastocyst or a 6-month old foetus has human value?
3)This issue is not about science, it is about abortion, plain and simple. Imagine the benefits to science if we could harvest babies to study birth defects? We could cut the spinal chords of the Homeless and try to repair them just like that movie with Gene Hackman and Hugh Grant. Heck, the Nazis did expiriments on Jews that have helped us learn how to treat hypothermia properly. We kill so many people in Iraq, whats the difference?
July 23rd, 2006 at 1:41 pm
1) This isn’t (at present) true. Adult stem cells are rather limited in what they can create, umbilical cells have only been able to effectively be turned into blood components and placental stem cells seem to have had so little research on them that people have no idea what they can do. Adult and umbilical cells have had a decade-plus of research done them and can do many great things that we should continue doing, but at this point it looks like they should not be counted on to create all types of cell. In contrast, embryonic stem cells seem to have the most potential but relatively little research, so that’s why they have not been used to treat anything yet. I really hope that placental cells can turn into any type of cell (I saw a paper on PubMed where they successfully differeniated them into neural cells, which is promising) but even the author of the seminal paper expresses skepticism about this, so research along both lines should be explored.
2) This is absolutely true; it’s a philosophical/moral issue not a scientific one. However, since over 60% of people favor direct federal funding for stem cell research and 70% favor lifting the ban — and both houses of Congress passed the bill — I would say that is the people rejecting the argument that it is a human.
3) I do agree that emerging technologies do present an ethical dillema that is not as clear cut as many of the ones science currently acknowledges. There should be much more of a public dialogue and emphasis on compromises, but unfortunately that seems to be in short supply in all aspects at the moment.
July 23rd, 2006 at 9:39 pm
O.k. I’ve publically supported government funding for embryonic stem cell research but I have to cry foul on this post. Sorry, Justin.
There is absolutely no assurance that embryonic stem cell research will ever yield a cure for anything. It’s promising, yes, but it’s incorrect to call it “technology that will absolutely help so many more people than our foreign policy ever will.”
I don’t think Bush’s position is scientifically or morally correct, but neither do I think it’s proper to position his veto as such an indefensible decision. There are serious moral judgements to weigh here and I’m sure, for Bush and those of his beliefs, it’s compromise enough to even allow privately funded research to continue.
At worst, the veto delays whatever medical advances may come from this research. It does not eradicate hope. We need not apologize to the world because we’re holdiong back our tax dollars. It simply isn’t that large a catastrophe. (Although, I repeat, I think Bush was wrong to veto the bill).
July 24th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Between the GOP’s intransigence on stem-cell research, their mountains-out-of-molehills obsession with same-sex marriage and their crusade against a popular activity enjoyed by millions of Americans (the latter of which I’m sorry to say many Democrats have joined in), I can only conclude that the GOP has either (a) calculated that they’ll win more votes from Christianists than they’ll lose from the various constituencies opposed to these things, or (b) gone completely insane.
If it’s (a), then somebody’s in for a rude awakening come November. That somebody could be non-Christianists like us, if Christianism does turn out to be the ascendant force in American politics that I’ve feared, but more likely it will be the GOP, for putting too many of their eggs in the Christianists’ basket.
July 24th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Wishful thinking. I’m not sure what the hell a Christianist is…except maybe Sullivan’s pithy, political demonization of “those people” with that unsophisticated tendency to vote with their conscious, morals, faith, belief, exc. which happens to correspond with traditional Christian beliefs? Oh yes, these people compose a rigid, high impermeable voting block…like the Elders of Zion, the Masons, now comes Saddlewood. I hear this term “Christianist” all over the place, now, like someone has stumbled onto this great hidden idea — oh, yes, it is the Christianist, before we just didn’t have a name for them! Well, actually, yes there was a name for them — Christians.
July 25th, 2006 at 9:30 am
I disagree with Bush and the Republican leadership on this one. If they are serious about not killing fetuses, they should ban the fertilization procedures which produce them, not ban the harvesting of stem cells from fetuses which are routinely destroyed. Nobody is ready to ban the fertilization procedures, for good reasons. Banning stem cells makes no sense as anything other than a “feel good” move. “Hey, look, we did something!”
On the other hand, it is pure speculation to suggest that this decision will cause untold suffering. More bombast.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
“They think it’s murder, plain and simple. Bush has stated this and Tony Snow restated it recently. But what I don’t get is that they don’t look at the innocents we’ve killed in Iraq as murder. That’s just collateral damage.”
Justin,
Murder isn’t so much a problem with the religious right on this condition. It has a much deeper spiritual implication. You see man can not actuall sin against god, until he is capable of doing this. A fetus is a perfect soul, without sin, and therefore is not deserving of destruction and god’s judgement of their soul. One thing the Religious right that so outwardly speak against stem cell research does not mention is what happens to the soul of an unborn baby. Can you freeze a soul? See killing a prisoner is OK because you are doing the work of God by condemning the guilty. An uborn child can not be condemned because it is without sin. The logic kinda works, but it’s fucked up at the same time.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
“Bush’s first veto as POTUS will keep … millions of cells safe…”
Not really. The cells in question are going to be destroyed anyway. They are just going to be dumped down the drain or thrown in the trash instead of used to improve millions of lives. What a culture of life!
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:21 am
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