Stem cell research shouldn't be a religious issue today, but it is for those supporting President Bush: speaking volumes about both his supporters, and the areas he chooses to lead (or shall I assert - not lead).
After all, when George W. Bush sent troops to Iraq, he knew that life would be taken on those battlefields, and for many of those that would survive, there was the prospect of living the remainder of their life without body parts, to protect American-style democracy, and world democracy if you accept that argument in its more inclusive form. Stem cell research, unrestrained, according to the very same people, is somehow taking life on the battlefield against a morally disinterested scientific community. And in choosing to call this research morally wrong, and the war in Iraq not. their line is implicitly drawn without saying so. But what of all those things that the promise of stem cell may offer someday, that war will not - like possibly replacing some of those body parts lost to a war, or more broadly to an accident, or to the result of a defect that could be corrected after birth. If we are offending the almighty by pursuing stem cell research without bounds, maybe we should hold out the possibility that we are offending the almighty as much, or more, by engaging in war - not just this war but any wars.
Aside from that more religious or spiritual examination, there is something interesting going on politically. Many known conservatives, and a few even on the right, have broken ranks on this same moral issue on stem cell research in varying degrees. Nancy Reagan and Senator Orrin Hatch, for instance, are to left of Bush on this. And coming up fast are the religious right that do not see stem cells as a moral issue. This group gets virtually no press, because they are still a very small in number.
In my book, the argument that the main part of the religious right has fashioned, is as tortured as it is wrong. Ultimately this is an extension of the pro-life argument, but only through a form of legerdemain. This is not too unlike a number of science vs. religion battles in eras gone by, and I suspect it will end up the same as most of those, while we limp along in the present.
