Sullivan on stem cell veto controversy
Lots of people in the blogosphere are talking about the ban on federally funded stem cell research. I've already got one post on it. Andrew Sullivan has come out in favor of the federal funds ban. I see his Catholicism coming through in his thinking on this. Needless to say, I desagree with him. He has printed some good e-mail responses to his support of the ban: here, and this one is especially important:
The problem with this ban means that none of the researchers implements funded with federal money can ever be involved/associated with research funded by other means. This includes the lab space, every beaker, piece of paper, pencil, etc.! This is not practical in the slightest. That means that a researcher, say here at UCSF, who wants to tap into the money allocated by the state of California for stem cell research, would have to have a completely different facility whereby NOTHING funded with federal dollars can enter, and that likely includes the researcher himself. In academic medicine this is impossible.
Comments
That's automatically a bad thing?
No, it is not automatically a bad thing when Catholicism influences someone. Perhaps my statement was a bit flip and insensitive. In this case, I think the Catholic influence pushes Sullivan in a direction I don't agree with.
I see Sullivan's Catholicism in his anti-torture stance, too. In that case, I think it pushes him in a direction I agree with: torture is a bad, stupid thing that our government should not be engaging in.
Yeah it's me again. I don't agree with you on a lot of things but I enjoy reading your blog. You always treat your commenters like a gentleman.
Many Catholics are against the Bush Iraq oil misadventure, torture, and destruction of human embryos. I consider it a very consistent point of view. They are all human rights issues. When we start to consider some humans of less value than ourselves we seem able to justify terrible violence.
Cheers,
Joe
Wow! That's poor English.
You are always a gentleman to your commenters.
That's better
At any rate, I'm glad you find Internal Monologue to be a place of relative courtesy. It's an issue I struggle with. On the one hand, politeness is good, and wins more people over than rudeness. On the other hand, what do you do when you feel the Bush administration is killing people for horrible reasons? Is politeness the appropriate reaction? Isn't it more appropriate to call him an immoral, incompetent, shameful embarrassment and moral stain on our country's honor? And is it wrong to call peopole who support his awful actions "wankers" or "morons"? I hope I can walk the right line on this: respectful of people, but not pulling my punches, either. I have yet to have really pro-Bush commenters engage me in debate, so my courtesy has not really been put to the test yet.
There is a very admirable clarity in the Catholic stance on human life: preserving human life is good, killing human life is bad. (Though I would point out that their endorsement of the "rhythm method" may in fact lead to a lot embryonic deaths.) I agree that much evil comes from "tinkering" with the definiation of what is human. Dehumanization is a common tactic when attempting to oppress, kill, stigmatize, or otherwise work evil on a group of people. Whenever the "they aren't really human" argument is used, we need to be on the lookout for moral trouble.
However, the beginning of life and the end of life cases present genuine challenges to this clear categorization of things as "living human" or "not living human". Normally, in our everyday world, these categories are quite clear to us. But where we draw the line when it comes to embryos is not obvious to me. And where we draw the line at the end of life, when someone is on life support or or missing most of their brain, is not clear either. And then there are the cases of people who are clearly alive, but suffering horribly and wish to end their lives, which are difficult, too. I think it is because these lines exist so clearly in our intuition but are so hard to find in these "borderline" cases perpetuates the contentiousness of these debates. If only God made each sacred human life radiate a special kind of energy easily detected in the lab. Then we wouldn't have to have these debates. We could just put the tissue in question under the "Sacred-o-meter"(TM) and get a reading.
The Catholic Church is pretty clear where it draws the lines that define what is human life (the Church might argue that it is just pointing out the moral lines that are already there), but I think there are other defensible places to draw (or percieve) those sacred lines. For me, the embryos in question when dealing with embryonic stem cell research have not entered the "sacred circle" which means they must be treated as people.