Stem Cell Wars: Why Religion and Politics Should Not Be Separated

The following is an excerpt from Lou Ruprecht's post on The Devil's Advocate, the official blog of Religion Dispatches.

The President's announcement yesterday that he intends to lift the eight-year Bush ban on federally funded human stem cell research presents the political left with an interesting problem. It's truly a puzzler and places the President in a pickle.

The hue and outcry has been immediate, and somewhat surprising... until you look at the way the President himself framed the issue. His intention, he said, is "to take the politics out of science" and to encourage the process of free and unhindered enquiry by bracketing all prior religious or political (or scientific?) commitments. The lifting of the ban was a crucial moment in the defense of free speech and the exercise of free expression, said the President.

This kind rhetoric is maddening to conservatives and rightly so; it places their moral concerns on a back burner, by suggesting that the articulation of such concern makes one anti-scientific.
Don't get me wrong: President Obama is surely right to announce, and in bold terms, that the nightmarish conditions under which scientists were forced to work under the Bush regime--with its casual disregard for the rule of law, its faith-based funding restrictions, its gag rules, and its systematic shutdown of research projects it did not like--represented the politicization of scientific enquiry in deeply disturbing ways.

And it carried a cost; the Bush administration created a great flight of scientists to the private sector, to foreign countries, and it decimated the morale at some of the premier scientific institutions funded by the US government, the Centers for Disease Control most notably.
But the President is wrong to suggest that politics can simply be extracted from scientific enquiry. This simple statement is actually part of much larger misunderstanding of the emergence of a conflict between modern science and traditional religion.

Read the rest at Religion Dispatches.

Comments

[ButImNotSureAboutU]

But to a large extent, this is anti-scientific. Look at the "moral leaders" that insist that embryonic stem cell research is wrong. They are the ones that ex-communicated the mother and doctor of a 9-year old child when they arranged for an abortion after the step-farther raped the child.

The embryos being used will most likely be destroyed. This seems to be more on the order of an organ transplant. When one weighs these factors, this "every sperm is scared" attitude really doesn't advance the discussion. There are many moral questions that need attention concerning the already born that are much more pressing than the fate of embryos headed for the incinerator. Where is the outrage concerning miscarriages? My mother certainly wasn't consoled when people told her it was "God's will". If he knew what was going to happen why start the pregnancy in the first place?

I agree that ethically we have to walk a fine line but reasonable people can discuss ethics and prohibitions. Once the religious weigh in, there is no conversation. Obama is right to let reasonable people decide. You can not reason with religious right.

[Lon]

This post seems largely right. But part of the problem is that the Bush administration, and conservatives in general, did too much of arguing for positions they held on ethical grounds by advancing bad science. Bush never tried to make the case that holding back stem cell research indefinitely would get in the way of finding cures to diseases. He claimed that there were enough stem cell lines available to do the research and then never returned to the subject when that proved to be false.

The arguments about global warming, and teaching intelligent design, and the morning after pill, etc. were always made more on the basis of bad science than ethical arguments, whether good or bad.

Obama is trying to signal an end to that pattern. But it is true that the stem-cell debate (although that has the same pattern of bad science with arguments that scientists don't think embryonic stem cells are more promising or they think they are more dangerous) is one that really is focused on an ethical issue. In this case the ethics favors research. But it is a mistake to pretend there is not an ethical component.

[jhamm1]

"This kind rhetoric is maddening to conservatives and rightly so; it places their moral concerns on a back burner, by suggesting that the articulation of such concern makes one anti-scientific."

Don't kid yourself, as the reason which validate Obama's remarks on this subject is the cold hard fact that the sole basis for opposition to stem-cell research is ingrained solely in religion. So yes, the "articulations of such concerns" do indeed qualify one as "anti-scientific" because by definition, such "concerns" are not ingrained in science .

Deal with it.