Quote Of The Day (And In A Bad Way)
by tristero
From Nancy Pelosi, who should know better, for heaven’s sakes:
“Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arguing for the bill’s passage. “And that is the embryonic stem cell research.”
One: This is a gratuitous insult to all thinking persons. Science is a process of inquiry that has enabled us to understand something about the nature of physical reality in a detailed fashion. It has taken centuries of hard, meticulous, and often backbreaking work to acquire this knowledge; the history of science is filled with failure, frustration, and fragmentary, provisional understandings. The relatively rare breakthroughs – Newton’s laws, Darwin’s natural selection, Einstein’s theory of relativity – are achieved only through enormous effort, not miracles. This is no gift from God but a quintessentially human endeavor.
Secondly, the kind of pandering, meaningless bullshit Pelosi mouthed will convince no one. But it does make clear how little a leading Democrat understands religious tropes in a modern political context. The rightwing retort is obvious: “God nowhere demands the sacrifice of human children for research. That’s the ethics of Mengele, not Jesus.” And from there, the “conversation” devolves quickly into idiotic arguments about when a fertilized egg becomes a human life. And the importance of the research, its potential benefits that are needed now, are forgotten.
Pelosi’s breathtakingly stupid comment merely indicates how far behind, still, Democrats are in developing a modern political rhetoric for their values and ideas. Here, for example, is a sentence from Bush’s statement opposing the stem cell bill:
Recent scientific developments have reinforced my conviction that stem cell science can progress in ethical ways.
The following discussion is not about the quality of the actual ideas, but their presentation; of course, any 1/4 way normal person – even Nancy Reagan – supports stem cell research. Nevertheless, Bush’s statement is quite sophisticated.*
Note the implicit, casual, natural-sounding assumption of the moral high ground, neatly embedded in the second half of the sentence. Note the assumption, further, that stem cell research inherently contains an ethical dimension. It is taken as axiomatic that this research has a moral component rather than being morally neutral like, say, the development of a more efficient tcp/ip would be.** And note the further assumption of a duality – either morally pursued or immorally pursued with no middle ground.
Yes, of course you can argue against such rhetoric but you argue uphill, because you first have to disentangle stem cell research from the numerous moral fetters Bush’s speechwriter has enveloped it in and only then can you construct an alternative – and far stronger – moral argument in favor of embryonic stem cell research.
By contrast, Pelosi’s remark is brain-dead on arrival. Worse than useless, it is misleading, insulting, and ineffective.
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*This should not be surprising. Because opposition to stem cell research is by any normal standards (religious or secular) completely indefensible, any statement that advocated such a position would have to be sophisticated in order to have any chance at persuasion. It goes without saying that it would be a Very Good Thing if the rightwing examined the content of their ideas half as carefully as they crafted their rhetoric.
**Rightwing Red Alert: Did I just say that embryonic stem cell research is as ethical as internet protocol development? Why yes, that’s exactly what I said. Both have exactly zero moral valence. One can imagine siituations in which both can be pursued unethically, but they aren’t.