Well, our fearless leader, and bumbling idiot, President Bush has finally done it. He used his veto power to stop a bill for the first time since taking office 5 1/2 years ago. But was it to cut spending, to remove pork, or to end wars? Nope, this moron used it to stop stem cell research which scientists say could be a renewable source of replacement cells and tissues to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, strokes, burns and more. So, way to go moron, you just continue to ruin lives at every turn.
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7 comments:
For once Bush made a decision based solely on moral principles and not politics. Agree with him on this issue or not (I think he is correct on this), a person ought to follow his conscience and the teachings of Scripture.
Pragmatic concerns don't trump the Bible. The ends do not justify the means. Physicians in Germany during Hitler's reign were advancing the cause of science as they experimented on Jews and other prisoners. However, no amount of medical advancement justifies the immorality of their action.
Bush did the right thing. For once.
Even a large number of republicans are against Bush on this one. I do not see any immoral action in stem cell research. The cells are retrieved from unused frozen embryo's that would otherwise be thrown away, should a woman be forced to have every egg that scientist are able to artificially fertilize implanted for possible childbirth? The doctors retrieve dozens of eggs, fertilize with thousands of sperms, and choose 4-8 of them to be implanted, the 12-20 others are frozen and after a successful birth, discarded. What a waste! After a successful birth, instead of discarding the unused embryos, do stem cell research and save lives. If people are comparing this to abortion, what is it when they are thrown away like they are currently doing? We should pass a law to stop it, maybe form a committee to investigate, maybe we should stop all infertility procedures all together.
The idea of stopping infertility procedure was obviously supposed to be sarcastic. God gave smart people the ability to come up with ways to help people. For example: Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and fertility doctors. Not using fertility procedures would be dumb...however, that is completely irrelevent to the real story.
Our republic, the USA, does NOT condone or create a state religion and therefore the government cannot dictate morality through its laws. To do so should be found unconstitutional, and it usually is and or will be once the ACLU gets ahold of it.
Bush should pull his personal opinions out of the legislature and uphold the constituion like he took an oath to do.
You may not like it or agree with it, but our country is only great if people get to do things that others don't like. There are a lot of people who don't believe Christians should be allowed to do things, but they don't their way either, yet.
If we allow the Goverment to trample on the rights of others, one day it will trample on ours. Stop them now. Reduce the size of government to its constitutionally mandated size. Return to "States Rights" and forget all the overbearing federal guidlines for everything we do.
VOTE LIBERTARIAN!
http://www.lp.org/
kadad said, "I do not see any immoral action in stem cell research." Now, there's a problem. Let's see, the government is supposed to send lots of money to Africa because that is a moral issue, but the head of the government is not allowed to make a decision based on what he thinks is a moral issue. There are double standards at work here.
Laws necessarily reflect the morality of its authors and enforcers. Separation of church and state is an illusion. When separation of church and state is raised as an issue in this country it is for the purpose of over turning some legal principle that has been a part of the country's heritage. Examine the laws of any country, and you will know its religious principles. The laws of the USA are more and more reflecting the general immorality espoused by the majority.
The feds should use OUR money to help people instead of starting wars we dont belong in.
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
It has nothing to do with the "morality" of helping and not letting thousands of people who are needlessly dying, it is simply the decent humane thing to do. However, our government has decided invading sovereign countries is more fun, so it can't afford to save lives.
The fact remains, when we allow the government to limit freedom, WE ALL LOSE. My question, that no one seems to be able to answer, is: If using the frozen embryos for research is "bad" or "immoral", why is it ok to throw them away? The president and other "religious leaders" are fine with washing these these frozen tissue masses down the garbage disposal, but against using them for life saving research. IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!!!
You are correct. It makes no sense to throw embryos away. Neither does it make sense to throw away aborted babies or to bury or burn dead people; unless you believe that God made man in His own image, and therefore, man has an innate dignity.
If that is true, then, like abortion, the first act is wrong, and therefore provides no justification for additional wrong actions.
This is a moral issue, not just pragmatic. Not everything that man can do should be done. Our actions, words, attitudes, and thoughts should be guided by God.
Here's another perspective on it from the Wall Street Journal Online on the subject:
President Bush cast the first veto of his 5 1/2-year presidency Wednesday, rejecting legislation to ease limits on federal funding for research on stem cells obtained from embryos," reports the Associated Press. Congress is almost certain to sustain the veto, since the bill passed by 63-37 in the Senate and 238-194 in the House, respectively 4 and 52 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for an override.
We must confess, we are ambivalent about this matter. We don't have strong qualms about federal funding for this research, and we wouldn't have a problem if the president signed it. We're not terribly troubled by the idea of destroying human embryos (though we respect those who are), and we're not qualified to evaluate the competing claims about the likely efficacy of embryonic vs. adult stem-cell research (the latter is uncontroversial).
On balance, we suppose we're inclined to support the legislation. But the tone of the debate gives us second thoughts--in particular, this October 2004 quote from John Edwards:
"We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. . . . People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research."
When people who claim to be speaking out for science talk like faith healers, they risk discrediting the entire enterprise. By contrast, President Bush's approach to the question, as we noted five years ago, is nuanced and thoughtful.
Further, Bush's foes and the press frequently misstate his position, referring to a "ban on stem-cell research." In fact, the Bush policy places no restrictions on any kind of stem-cell research that does not receive federal money, or on federal funding of adult stem-cell research. It does limit federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to those cell lines that were in existence at the time the policy was initiated, in August 2001, but prior to then there was no federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, so that the policy actually liberalized the conditions for federal research grants. Supporters of research subsidies are asking for a further liberalization, not a reversal of a "ban."
We won't pretend to be shocked, shocked that politicians are engaging in demagoguery and dishonesty. We're cynical enough to realize that is what pols do when they think they have a winning issue, and that's why we haven't totally turned against the pro-funding position.
We do wonder, though, if this really is as winning an issue as Bush's foes think it is. Of the five Republican senators generally considered vulnerable in November, only Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island voted "yes." Jim Talent of Missouri, Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania all voted against the bill, as did Jon Kyl of Arizona and George Allen of Virginia, whom the most optimistic Democrats also think they have a chance of defeating. Only one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted "no," and he also is up for re-election this year and is regarded as vulnerable.
It may be that these opponents are acting on principle, heedless of political considerations, or it may be that their vulnerability makes them more inclined to be responsive to their pro-life base, though even the latter explanation suggests the politics are somewhat complicated. And if the politics are complicated, it is because, as even the left-wing magazine Mother Jones acknowledges, the morality of destroying embryos is fraught:
Aanis Elspas is a mother of four. Unlike most parents, she had three of her children simultaneously. The nine-year-old triplets were born in 1997 after Elspas underwent a series of in vitro fertilization treatments for infertility. . . . The problem is that Elspas also has 14 embryos left over from the treatment that produced her 10-year-old. The embryos are stored in liquid nitrogen at a California frozen storage facility--she is not entirely sure where--while Elspas and her husband ponder what to do with them.
Give them away to another couple, to gestate and bear? Her own children's full biological siblings--raised in a different family? Donate them to scientific research? Let them . . . finally . . . lapse? It is, she and her husband find, an intractable problem, one for which there is no satisfactory answer. So what they have done--thus far--is nothing. Nothing, that is, but agonize. . . .
Elspas is by no means alone, either in having frozen human embryos she and her husband must eventually figure out what to do with, or in the moral paralysis she feels, surveying the landscape of available choices.
Mother Jones, not surprisingly, quotes one expert who "believes that with better patient counseling and logistical coordination between fertility clinics and research labs, many more unused embryos could be directed toward stem cell research, and that many patients would be happy to know that their embryos are being used to find a cure for afflictions such as Parkinson's disease and juvenile diabetes."
That may be true, and many people (including this columnist) find it hard to credit the absolutist pro-life position that destroying an embryo is tantamount to killing a person. But Aanis Elspas's anguish suggests also that one doesn't have to be a pro-life absolutist to be troubled by the idea that human embryos are disposable.
Ultimately the question comes down to the basis of authority. How does one decide? Is it simply you say one thing, I say another, Bush says another, someone else says something else, and each decides for himself.
I contend there is an ultimate source of authority: the Word of God. Decisions only have legitimacy when based upon the authority of God's Word. Otherwise, like the Israelites in the book of Judges, everyone is doing that which is right in their own eyes, which leads only to moral degradation and God's judgment.
If we agree on the authority of God's Word than we can argue about its application to specific situations (and there will be plenty of room to argue about application!). But without a common starting point, we are talking in different languages and will get no where.
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