Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity

Consider this, from Martin Luther King's "Strength to Love" in 1963:

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Bush will reportedly use his first veto...his first veto of his Presidency... on the stem cell issue. Keep in mind, this is the same mighty veto pen he has not used on unchecked Congressional spending bills.

The reason why he has not vetoed any Congressional spending bills, among many other fantastic pieces of legislation is, according to Rep. Jack Kingston (R - Georgia), Vice Chair of the Republican Conference, "[i]f he was vetoing a lot of House-Senate Republican bills, it would make us look chaotic and un-unified." Yes. You are now at least unified on the most out-of-control defecit spending in U.S. history. Congratulations. I digress...

It has been remarked in Congress that the use of federal dollars to "kill young human life (Re. Sam Brownback, R - Kansas)" is unacceptible and is a position that the President is taking as well. The President's 5,127,453rd spokesperson, Jay Lefkowitz, has even stated that "[t]he president feels he made the right decision, and a principled decision, and he's not going to be swayed by the fact that he may not have the votes on Capitol Hill." Never mind the science, he is sticking to his guns, like so many times before, which has so far worked pretty well for the U.S., right?

I my last post, I rambled on about science and religion's exclusive world views and how truth is created by the acceptance of both. The moral compromise struck by Congress and presented to the Senate is one that weighs the moral implications of a possible cure-all with that of a morally void program of fetal tissue harvesting, which most sane people would find deplorable. The bill package would allow federal funding for research on stem cell lines derived from frozen embryos that are stored at fertility clinics and slated for destruction. Additional bills would encourage research into creating stem cell lines without destroying human embryos and would ban the creation of a fetus solely for the purpose of destroying it and harvesting its body parts, meant as a way to soften more prominent Conservative Republicans.

Despite those restrictions, these bills are headed for a veto, thus still catering to a conservative base of religious absolutists, for whom this issue is black-and-white: the life of an embryo, regardless of its fate of some fertility clinic's trash can, outweighs all else, including other life. The irony is one I cannot grasp, and the moral certainty astounds me.

Worse, though, than the moral certainty is the sincerety with which they hold their views, and our President his. They consciously remain ignorant of the science behind stem cell research, and somehow are completely unable to hear that embryos will not be harvested, and the lines that will be used are most certainly from those embryos slated for death.

This is where their own moral imperative again breaks down for me: fertility clinics. These dens on iniquity certainly harvest scores of embryos and pump them into waiting women. Those souls that go unused are discarded. But somehow, this is an "okay" death, or at least one they are not willing to touch. So maybe their moral certainty does have some opt-out clauses, including fertility clinics. I don't see conservative evangelical women lining up to "rescue" unused embryos from the clinic's dumpster...

I see Congress and the Senate, then, actually weighing the two world views and creating a compromise that allows for research, rewards ways to get embryonic stem cells that actually don't destroy an embryo and prevent morally devoid capitalists from running stem cell harvesting clinics near, say, inner cities and college campuses.

It is, again, the fundamentalist mistrust of all things science. There will always be people of both camps: unfettered scientific research (a la Tuskegee) and pure religious literalism and fundamentalism. But I expect more out of my secular leaders in Government in that a rational view will prevail. Indeed it has among our legislative branch, and I suspect maybe so in our judicial branch. But our Executive has chosen to align himself on a path that ultimately contradicts itself, as pointed out above.

It is interesting how a world view can change based on circumstance. Bill Frist conservative Republican leader fo the Senate and a survivor of lymphoma, sees the value of this research and how the President back in August 2001 had completely hampered it. The debate over this research, however, is apparently over. The President has ignored all rational argument and instead took an extremist position, well out of touch with the majority of American sentiment.

Holding true to "down-home" values, blatantly ignorant of any of "them scientific types that talk all fancy," our leader embodies what another advocate for peace and understanding warned us about 43 years ago.