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Journeyman
A Journal for the Inquiring Christian
Opinion
Opening Pandora's Box, Yet Again
| Overview: While the president has forbid the federal government from being party to the destruction of embryonic babies for stem cell research, he has opened a dangerous door here. |
"Hearken, you who are in power over the multitude and lord it over throngs of peoples! Because authority was given you by the Lord and sovereignty by the Most High, He will probe your works and scrutinize your counsels! Though you were ministers of the kingdom, you judged not rightly, and did not keep the law, nor walk according to the will of God, therefore terribly and swiftly shall He come against you. Judgment is stern for the exalted! The lowly may be pardoned out of mercy, but the mighty shall be mightily put to the test. For the Lord of all shows no partiality, nor does he fear greatness, because He himself made the great as well as the small, but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny looms." - Wisdom 7:2-9
I am reminded of one of the final lines of Jack Nicholson’s character on ‘A Few Good Men’ after being arrested for a crime in the courtroom. He said to the prosecuting attorney "you have just weakened a country Caffey". It is my belief that President Bush has just weakened the forces promoting life with his decision. Up until this morning, I thought President George Bush was going a great job as president. How much of that was due to a contrast with the former president I am not sure but I saw nothing that would detract from the starting grade of A that every president deserves to have when he starts his presidency. (Where they go from there is up to them.) I take a dim view of politics even though I have contemplated running for public office myself at different times. The reason is simple: politicians by nature think the purpose of being a public servant is to show a record of "achievements". "Vote for me because I can get you a library" or "I will work on reviving the economy" or other such promises. The former is bad because it reinforces in people’s minds that the money collected by the government is theirs to do with as they please rather then the money belonging to the people. (The latter will be dealt with in brief also before getting to the theme of this column.)
The definitive proof of the aforementioned assertion is that you will never find a single liberal Democrat that will support a tax break that is anything more then symbolic — if they will even do that. Of course it is beyond the scope of this column at the moment to explain why representatives who run on the state of the economy as if they were the ones who actually were responsible for the economy is quite misleading. Former President Ronald Reagan got it right when he said that all he did was make the environment conducive to growth and investment. Unlike our last president, Reagan was not arrogant enough to claim that the growth in the economy was due to him. No, he always put the credit where it belonged: on the American people. These are bad habits that President Bush has thus far avoided, showing that to some extent he has learned from the past. Unfortunately, he seems to have fallen into another trap not uncommon to the politician: the trap of improper compromise.
The trap of improper compromise differs from proper compromise, which is an approach taken to get half a loaf rather then none at all. The latter is used by those who are not in power or who do not have the power to get all of what they are seeking at the present time. (An example would be voting for a bill that restricted abortions — evil is thereby reduced — versus the purist who would vote against anything that is less than their ultimate agenda.) Unacceptable is the policy that insists on all or nothing when it comes to limiting evil. Politicians who are capable of realistically achieving their entire agenda improperly use this policy of half a loaf. When applied to areas that are either evil in and of themselves or which are conducive to opening or expanding a realm of greater evil, they move into the forefront of the improper compromise. Our president this morning made an improper compromise. Hence I am no longer as pleased with him as I was prior to this morning. The improper compromise was on stem cell research. The president claims that "I have made this decision with great care and I pray that it is the right one".(1) Unfortunately it is the wrong one.
Yes the president seemingly has forbid the federal government from being party to the destruction of embryonic babies for stem cell research. But he has opened a dangerous door here, one that will not easily (if ever) be closed in a society such as ours. (Which has grown increasingly apart from the religious principles of its founding over the past one hundred years.) I am not opposed to research into ways that help in the areas that the proponents of these measures are seeking. However, we need to make a very important distinction here. If life begins at conception (and I challenge anyone to demonstrate to the contrary) then the embryo has an immortal soul. We take an out of sight out of mind approach as a culture on many things. Moralists who would decry the Holocaust, the Ukrainian terror famines of Stalin, and the killing fields of Pol Pot sanctioned killing fields of their own and wrapped them up on the Orwellian double-speak of "choice". Let us look at this logically.
If life begins at conception then the death of an unborn child is at a bare minimum just as tragic as any of the deaths sanctioned by the above dictators. In fact the child if anything has an even more tragic situation since unlike most people past the age of reason the unborn child is innocent of any willful fault. But in a society where dialectic contrariness rules, people can decry the immoral killings of Jeffrey Dahmer one moment and then voice support for a "woman’s right to choose" the next. This is the problem with President Bush’s decision; it does not prevent private groups from acting as harvesters of embryo cells. It does not prevent embryos from being created specifically for the purpose of research — research, which I remind you kills the unborn child.
I still think Bush is an overall good president — and I have no reason to presume that this issue was not a difficult one for him to make. But he is not a great president or else he would have outlawed research on human stem cells and directed scientists to do their research on animal embryos. Great leaders of men step up in these cases and good men come close but to some extent fall short. I am sure some people would be aghast at my suggestion to use animal embryos for stem cell research. After all, to those who have a skewed moral compass and are logically impaired, the lives of animals without souls are sacrosanct while the lives of human beings made in God’s image and likeness are matters of "free choice". That is the very kind of inconsistency that is at the heart of this entire debate. Bishop Joseph Fiorenza, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops summed up human stem research as "unacceptable" because "it allows our nation’s research enterprise to cultivate a disrespect for human life".(2) Of course in a nation that legalizes abortion has already done this. That we are so desensitized that even more death is being countenanced would I hope serve as a wakeup call to those who are interested in building a Culture of Life. This will not be possible until we start being truthful with ourselves.
This truth must start with the axiom that life is sacred period. We either take life seriously or we do not. Willful murder is evil. Abortion is just as evil. Killing an embryo is therefore likewise just as evil. Life is present at all of these stages and in two of them we sanction the killing under the impression that it is morally good to do evil so that good may come from it. (The logical fallacy that the end justifies the means.) I am reminded of the Jews who thought they were ritually pure for the Sabbath after handing over their Messiah to be crucified. The same illogical premise is at the heart of the stem-cell research debate to say nothing of the abortion debate of course.
Index:
Seattle Times: August 10, 2001, page A1
Seattle Times: August 10, 2001, page A2
©2001, "Opening Pandora’s Box Yet Again", written by I. Shawn McElhinney. This text may be downloaded or printed out for private reading, but it may not be uploaded to another Internet site or published, electronically or otherwise, without express written permission from the author.
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