So Bush Was Right On Stem Cells

ONE THING you can say about President Bush. He makes a decision and then accepts the consequences. Back in 2001 he decided to restrict the use of federal funds in research on embryonic stem cells.

As we know, Democrats decided that they had an issue. So they dragged out helpless victims and Ron Reagan to argue that stem cells would help the blind see and the lame walk. Presidential candidate John Edwards got in on the act, as you would expect.

Obviously the only thing that stood in the way of a medical miracle was the president and his fundamentalist Christian morality and the theocrats who supported him.

But last week the New York Times reported that two scientists. James A. Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, had found a way of making stem cells equivalent to embryonic stem cells without using embryos.

As Charles Krauthammer puts it:

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

He highlights a quote of Thomson’s:

If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.

Really? I thought only knuckle-dragging Bible-thumpers had a problem with embryonic stem cell research.

It all points up the fact that President Bush is a serious man who is not afraid to make serious decisions.

When you make serious decisions it helps to have a serious politico-religious world view. For most people, that means taking a fully worked out politico-religious system—such as, for example, Christianity—and using it as a guide. President Bush, who had a less than perfect youth like many well-born baby-boomers, became a serious Christian when the time came to grow up. Obviously this belief system—and we all have one—informs his decisions about government policy.

The reason why this is helpful is that Christianity, like Anglo-Saxon law, is an accumulation of centuries of actual human experience in dealing with serious decisions about life and death. Over the centuries hundreds of lawyers and judges have worked on our great edifice of law, adapting it slowly in the light of new cases and conflicts that come up for adjudication. The same thing is true with religion.

In our modern era we have a lot of people who want to throw up all the accumulated wisdom and start from scratch with a new system better adapted to modern times. Unfortunately—and you may have noticed this—starting over means making all the mistakes of our ancestors all over again and learning from them the hard way.

In the twentieth century the hard way added up to about 200 million human deaths in world wars and terrors.

Anyway, now it turns out that President Bush was right. We don’t need to use human embryos in stem cell research. After all the fuss, the president looks like a serious man who thought seriously about an issue, talked to all the experts, and made a serious decision.

Quite often, more often than you might think, when you do that you get to be right.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.