A sad day for America

I knew that our new president had some wildly left-wing ideas, but his stance on stem-cell research is beyond what I expected for his first term. One writer for the Washington Post put it this way:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn... While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama replaced it with no line at all.

This is my favorite quote in the article:

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men.

And the grand finale...

Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

Seriously, though, this is really sad...and scary!