Posted on 11/28/2001 5:12:30 AM PST by VoodooEconomist
"We should not as a society grow life to destroy it," said President Bush in response to the news that a Massachusetts company had cloned a human embryo. Though Bush says that’s "exactly what's taking place," scientists interviewed dispute that there is any cloning going on.
As has become the norm with these type of bioethics issues, no one can even agree on the essential facts of the case. Larry Goldstein of the University of California at San Diego said the company "induced human eggs to undergo a couple of rounds of divisions. What they made was not human. I don't know what they made, but they're not really embryos."
Human life or no, Bush is clearly concerned. So let’s talk about some other forms of life that are currently under some degree of stress, namely life in the suburbs of Khandahar, Afghanistan. We are not talking embryos or embryo-like objects. These are full-grown adults and their children. No scientists dispute that these are people. No one disputes that life is being destroyed. What’s in dispute is the justification. What Bush says that science must not do he is more than willing to do under the guise of war.
The other day, American cluster bombs fell in this area and killed at least 100 unarmed civilians. These facts have been confirmed by many Western observers. One man affected is Juma Khan of Charikari, husband and father of six. Make that widower and father of one 11-year-old daughter named Gulshan who has severe head injuries but is still breathing. A bomb hit their house during the breakfast hour of 8am. It killed five of his children and nine other family members, including his brother and his brother’s children.
"I was just sitting there. The next thing I knew, people were digging me out of the rubble," Mr. Khan told the Independent. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is just war and we have to buck up to face it, and then escalate. But to Khan, this was his wife, his children, his brother, and his nieces and nephews – all that matters in the world.
Who is responsible? The pilot who dropped the bombs? Maybe. But there will be no prosecutions. It’s not even clear that there are channels for such things. Despite the platitudes about sparing innocents heard early in this war, there is no outcry or even admission of wrongdoing.
Besides, the pilot was following orders. Who was giving the orders? Sure, the generals, but on whose authority are they operating? The Joint Chiefs of Staff, but who empowers them? There’s only one man: George W. Bush, the man who just decried cloning on grounds that it destroys life.
Bush is willing to use all his now-considerable power to try to stop the division of human embryos, and isn’t going to let any platitudes about the "progress of science" stop him. And yet here is a case where he has full power to stop the destruction of life right now. And yet he does nothing. Far from it: he orders more bombing in more countries, using violence to achieve his political ends.
It strikes me that we have a very interesting case of human psychology in operation here. As a man, Bush wouldn’t hurt anyone, particularly not innocent people. As president, he believes it is his responsibility to defend the right to life. But as commander-in-chief in wartime, he can in good conscience oversee the wholesale slaughter of innocents and lose no sleep. He can smile, laugh, and enjoy 85 percent popularity.
Of course many thinkers have exposed the immorality of the state and its wars, including Frederic Bastiat, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Betrand de Jouvenel, Herbert Spencer, Franz Oppenheimer, and Murray N. Rothbard, among many others. Their writings provide brilliant insight into how the state "thinks," and its exaltation of itself over everything else on earth.
They show, for example, that the state purports to punish theft and murder while making theft and murder the very essence of its domestic and foreign policy. The state claims to make and uphold the law yet exempts itself from punishment when it transgresses that law. It claims to punish evil doers yet its own actions, in war and the regular conduct of domestic policy, inspire and motivate evil doers to copy the state’s ways. And when it comes to actually punishing crime, it hits crime against itself far more severely than crimes against its citizens.
All this is clear. But what can we say about a man like Bush, a decent fellow who loves his wife and children, who goes to church, who probably entered public life with the most sincere motivations. How does he sleep and pray knowing that his decisions as president are tearing off the heads and ripping open the bellies of innocent men, women, and children? Does he blame the terrorists for making him do this? Perhaps, but that only takes him so far. Under no standard of justice is killing innocents in another nation a proper retaliation for the killing of innocents in our nation.
There’s no cracking some mysteries of human psychology, but I think the answer has something to do with the ideology of public service, and particularly the mythology of the moral burdens of the presidency. For generations, every historian of note has held up the most mass-murdering of presidents for public adulation. The "moral burden" of the presidency amounts to doing very immoral things under the cover of statesmanship.
"The evil that men do lives after them," Shakespeare has Mark Antony say. "The good is oft interred in their bones." But with US presidents, the tendency is precisely the reverse.
Can all the historians be wrong? Yes, certainly. But it takes a special kind of intellect and moral courage to reach this conclusion. You have to be an extremely independent thinker. If you are like Bush, a conventional sort of guy, you are perfectly willing to believe the conventional wisdom that what a president does in wartime is not mass murder but rather statesmanship.
That is why it is more urgent than ever to underscore the essential idea of the liberal tradition, that morality is universal and that the state is not exempt from it. We should not grow life in order to destroy it, by any means, whether science or war. Only the tradition that applies that view consistently can restrain the state, and it must be taught to a new generation.
Ho hum -- the typical secularist whine. "How can you be against cloning/stem cell embryo growth/abortion and at the same time support capital punishment/war??"
Truly a dilemma for inferior minds, I'll grant you. Let me give Lew a hint: it has something to do with 'sin', a concept that no doubt you are completely befuddled by.
As for embryos, under this administrations logic, its immoral to clone & kill/research only if the embryo was killed after August 16th 2001.
If I was the pilot, I would be insulted at this. Yes, I would have been obeying orders, but not blindly. I would have volunteered for service in the Air Force, and would have willingly volunteered for this particular mission. Lew's complaint would properly be directed to me, the pilot, not my superiors.
Except for accidents all bombing of civilians is done under orders. Presumably the pilot sees nothing wrong in it.
I guess, then, by this "logic" it would be wrong for me to shoot an intruder in my home who was threatening me. This entire essay ignores the hallowed concept of self-defense - probably because it collapses if the right to self-defense is factored in.
My point was that, as the pilot, I would take responsibility for my actions, not hide behind the "following orders" excuse. In other words, if I thought that I was being given an unlawful order, as in the case of Nazi concentration camp guards, I would have to have the guts to refuse the order or face the consequences myself.
In the case of the bombing of Taliban and Al Qaeda positions (who, themselves, put civilians at risk by their own selection of defensive positions), I would gladly have volunteered for the assignment. It was a necessary prelude to what even the pacifists call for: bringing the WTC culprits to "justice."
It should follow through to its logical conclusion and argue that Bush is responsible for all automobile traffic deaths.
So, you must believe that Bush is just chasing the Taliban for fun.
You conspiracists are getting goofier all the time.
Except for accidents all bombing of civilians is done under orders.
Maybe you'd like to point out where civilians have been targeted in this war.
This is same old anti-war, anti-death penalty crap we've seen forever from these liberal bleeding hearts.
To them, no war, no death is justified and the civilian death penalty is equally abhorrent. Nothing new here. The Bush administration's retaliation against the Taliban in Afghanistan, even after a warning to turn over the terrorists they were hiding and a three week delay before attacking is considered a 'political' move. Please. For Bush to do less than retaliate against bin Laden and the Taliban would be grounds for impeachment following the September 11th attack. This complaint is unfounded and foolish.
The U.S. death penalty is brought to bear on convicted murderers under certain circumstances after a conviction by a jury (usually), many appeals and evidence hearings. It's use is decided by the citizens of the states where it is in effect. It can be voted in or out in our democracy. Abortion is an attack on a helpless infant in it's mother's womb and is murder no matter what pretty rationalizations we choose to employ to justify it or the terminology we place on it to make ourselves feel better about it. Not the moral equilivent of war or the death penalty issued against a convicted, adult murderer. Liberals never stop attempting to blur the distinction for their own ends but it won't wash.
War against terrorism, as fought by the U.S. in this instance, is totally correct as well as necessary and to use the random deaths of some Afghan civilians as a rationale to not do anything at all but talk about terrorism in some U.N. forum would be insane and immoral, considering the loss of 'civilian' life incurred by America on September 11th.
I, for one, reject this absurd idea that our attacks against the Taliban forces that supported and offered a base of operations to the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th and Bush's support of the death penalty is somehow equal to abortion; the killing of the innocent in the womb. All Afghans have to take responsibility for the Taliban and the terrorists within their country. American forces try not to kill or hurt Afghan civilians but civilian deaths are inevitible in a war. The terrorists we're fighting make civilians a prime target and use every available weapon to kill civilians. There is simply no moral equivalance.
The left's pure, utter hatred of religion (actually, only Christianity - Socialism is beloved, "eastern mystical" religions, and witchcraft and paganism are okay) are on full display here.
The moral need (right/justifcation) for certain wars and self-defense has been debated since before there was language. Best expressed as a "moral war" - there are cases where war is NOT murder, but is essential in preventing far greater crimes and injustice.
And, except that the left is too blind by their hatred and prejudices, there are also cases where the "right" to life is a requirement that overrides the left's desire for "convenience" and "pleasure" .... Regardless, they will argue that "not getting stretch marks" is more important that an innocent's child's right to life - and so inject salt into veins of a living, kicking infant; but then they also immediately claim that a properly tried, proven guilty, multiply-reviewed mass murderer does not "deserve" to die a humane death.
Sure, you can "win" an arguement with equally prejudiced socialists (who already join you in having no morals, no ethics, and no "truth" - only hypocracy and evil) by claiming falsehoods.
But that does NOT change the facts: Capital punichment is NOT murder (because of the proven fact of "guilt" by a specific criminal. War, when fought to in defense of naked agression, when other means have been rejected (as they were!), and when civilian deaths are NOT INTENDED and are DELIBERATELY AVOIDED by the US to ALL means possible (a minor fact that the left deliberately ignores - again. As in Korea, as in Vietnam, as in Somalia, as Kuwait, ..... where in each case (UNTIL CLINTON attacked the aspirin factory!) the US deliberately restricted its military (increasing its danger) to limit civilian casualities.
But the left prefers to ignore the deliberate murder of innocent life for the convenience of the the mother....and (in cloning cases) is deliberately emphasising cloning as an attack on the pro-life movement because of their abortionist/homosexual supporters hatred.
Because the only way homosexuals can reporduce is through cloning....and the selfish, self-centered "me only" generation (genetically) NEEDS desperately to reproduce (but can't because of previous sterilization, drug use, abortions, "delays" to enjoy "the good life" and "not be bothered by children earlier when they biologically could.
But now, the left's elites are starting to get older, to die. With millions now realizing they have no children, but these same millions do not want the "messy" part of haiving to "put up with" a proper spouse. And all the restrictions that marriage requires as biologically "correct."
The "health" benefits of cloning are simple exaggerations: made deliberately by people who want to embaress the religious conservatives with lies like this writer. Claims of C"ures" are no more valid than any of the tens of millions of times that the "cure for cancer" is said to be lurking in the rain forest, in the ANWAR, in the next federally funded "crisis" that they want money.
What's cloning worth? Why is now being PUBLICIZED by the media darlings of the left?
It's the hatred of the religious conservatives. It's the money to be made from the rapidly aging liberal elites who have no children. And it's the genetic desire of the homosexual community to reproduce themselves.
Yep Lew..... wearing different hats requires making decisions based upon the particular requirements of the hat that is on your head at the time..... One hatters don't have to do that do they?
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