Bush Take Cloning Advice From Trekkie
We have known about George W. Bush's special love of "faith-based" perspectives for some time. Recent revelations about Diana Schaub, a Loyola College professor and advisor to President Bush, published in the Baltimore Sun take the role of "faith" in making policy to new heights.
It turns out that Schaub's strong opposition to cloning and embryonic stem cell research was formed watching Star Trek.
As the Sun points out, this might be called quirky if she weren't a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.
A registered Republican, Schaub defends her views as the logical result of careful study of the works of Abraham Lincoln and Captain James T. Kirk.
Her favorite episode is one in which the crew of the USS Enterprise answers an ancient distress call and finds a planet whose only residents are children, the result of a botched scientific attempt to prolong life.
Instead of aging naturally, the children live hundreds of years before reaching puberty. When they become teenagers, they suddenly perish. The crew reverses the effects of the experiment, enabling the children to age and die naturally.
"I find that there are good reasons to be opposed to embryonic stem cell research and human cloning," she said. "Both Lincoln and the Enterprise argue that there ought to be certain moral limits to the scientific project, and they help us articulate what those limits are."
For her those limits are incredibly strict. She regularly likens stem cell research to slavery, arguing that because embryos have few natural advocates it is easy for people to treat them as inferior beings available for economic or scientific gain.
Instead of allowing embryos to serve that natural prupose of replacing generations, they will be used to benefit the living by prolonging their lives. For Schaub this is nothing less than pure evil. "It is slavery, plus abortion."
As my first year logic professor taught me, a proof can be perfect but that perfection cannot speak to the truth of your premise.
Like much of the abortion debate, her perspective is derived from a basic calculation that values potential life over existing life. Whatever one feels about the ethical value of this perspective one must acknowledge that it is not the only answer to this question. Calling efforts to help the elderly, the sick, and the dying "evil" can only come from an ethical framework that I consider suspect.
The disturbing aspect of this story continues to be here prominence in the White House.
She claims to be moved by the stories of paralyzed children but hold her ground.
"I don't think there's anybody in America that doesn't know somebody who has been affected by a disease," Schaub said. "That's part of what makes it difficult for me to hold the moral line."
As one might guess from her rants, Schaub is not even an ethicist. She chair's the Political Science department at Loyala College and still holds out hope that she will someday be able to teach a course in bioethics.
Perhaps it would be better for us all if she attended one as a student first.
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Who is this guy?
You can always tell which governmental agencies hold true power by their proximity to the West Wing. Along with the Treasury and Defense, the closest agency office to the WW is the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, housed in one of the old rowhouses on Lafayette Square.
So it's no wonder that Bush thinks so highly of this flawed logic.
Hmm . . . I saw your headline a day or so before reading it and assumed you were writing a parody article of some sorts.
After reading it, I thought, that's insane! But then, I remembered that the only one real, inherent racist view I hold is my race-based hatred against Vulcans, which I attribute almost solely to Star Trek (there was also that one experience where I got beat up in an alley by a Vulcan, but, really, who's counting?), and so I thought, eh, makes sense to me.
I was listening to Laura Ingraham this morning on my way into work, and she had some guy from the Acton Institute on, speaking about the Schiavo affair, and they were going back and forth about how life isn't supposed to be all pleasure, and we should be more concentrated on the afterlife, and we have to deal with life even when things are a little tough. And "a little tough" is as apt a description as any for someone in a persistent vegetative state, no?
All of this is to say, in agreement with John, and spiralling off tangientially: No one should be forced to suffer because somebody else thinks the afterlife is where it's at. That logic is broken.