I'm still not sure I understand Neubob's working definition of "religious wacko". Am I to take it that anyone who disaproves on religious grounds of destruction of embryos to support embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) is a religious wacko in his book? After all, my moral objections are grounded in my belief in the sanctity of human life, which in turn are influenced to great extent by my religious views (I also believe stealing and adultery are wrong, ideas also influenced by said views). Am I a religious wacko? If so, I'm in abundant company, I'd say.
I guess a way to turn Neubob's original question around is, "Now that non-ESCR research has proven time and again to be orders of magnitude more productive than ESCR, what reason will the secular humanists find to demand the continued destruction of nacent human lives in pursuit of ESCR (and cloning, by extension)?" Or to put it another way, if I can save the notional little girl in the burning building (an inaccurate analogy, but lets go with it) without the necessity of harvesting and then destroying human embryos, is that not the preferred choice? I put it this way because the choice was never saving one or the others, but purposely putting the embryos in the fire as a precondition for (possibly, maybe, sometime in the future after spending billions of dollars) saving the little girl.
The following artical by medical ethicist Wesley Smith sums the situation up nicely.
Bush Bears Fruit
New discoveries pave the way for ethical stem-cell research, thanks to the president’s policies.
By Wesley J. Smith
Throughout his presidency, the Science Intelligentsia has castigated President Bush for placing limits on the federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research (ESCR). Acting as if he had a banned ESCR, which of course he hadn’t, “the scientists” and their camp followers in the media and on Capital Hill accused the president of withholding cures from the ill in order to impose his religious beliefs on a reluctant public.
Little noted in all of the caterwauling, was that ESCR and human-cloning research (SCNT) have been funded bounteously — to the tune of nearly $2 billion. Not only has the National Institutes of Health put more than $150 million in recent years into human ESCR (about $40 annually), but according to a recent report put out by the Rockefeller Institute, to date about $1.7 billion has poured into ESCR and SCNT from philanthropic sources — and this doesn’t include the hundreds of millions granted annually by the states for cloning and ESCR experiments.
So what’s really going on here? Yes, the president’s policies have forced some research centers to set up separate labs for research on Bush-approved- and non-approved, stem-cell-research lines. But what really got under “the scientists” skin was the clarion moral message sent by the president: It is wrong to treat nascent human life as a mere natural resource to be sown, reaped, and consumed.
Big Biotech responded to the Bush policy by mounting a powerful public advocacy campaign aimed at both opening the federal spigots, and breaking the back of the moral opposition to ESCR and human cloning research. Railing against the president and supporters of his policy as “anti-science,” ESCR/SCNT advocates accused Bush of denying sick people needed medical breakthroughs. Human cloning via SCNT was redefined from “therapeutic cloning” in the advocates’ lexicon to merely “stem-cell research.” The change of term constituted a clever ruse that bundled and confused in people’s minds, the morally acceptable advances being made in adult stem-cell research, the morally dubious human cloning project, and the use of “spare” embryos for research that were “going to be discarded anyway.”
