As a person with an incurable form of cancer that has plagued me for the past 11 years I have a very personal stake in this controversy. One of the pathways to a cure for Myeloma is through gene therapy and stem cell research is crucial in this. In 1999 I underwent a peripheral stem cell transplant, which saved my life. I have it on good authority (the cancer researcher who oversaw my transplant) that embryonic stem cell research was and is all-important for millions of people, like myself, in keeping us alive well past the expiration date (of decades past) we would have faced before this life saving research was accomplished and transplants offered.

I have to ask these religionists, who, if, decades ago, their goals of stopping stem cell research had been achieved; Would it be better for my four children (two of which are 12 years old) and society in general, if their father had been dead these past ten years? Because that's part of the alternate universe these so-called moralists advocate and it would have meant the unnecessary deaths of millions of Leukemia and Myeloma patients. I am sorry to have inconvenienced so many embryos but as a society our better nature has prevailed and I'm still here to love my children and they me.

To my dying day I will advocate for all people that face catastrophic illness; that they be given a better, longer life and work against the forces of inhumanity that absurdly imbue embryos with a right-to-life but, effectively, deny these same rights to living, breathing men, women and children. I hope that the righteous, church-going folks who advocate against embryonic stem cell research would not forget the living and especially people like me. I also pray they stop checking their humanity at the church door.

May I., for one, and without knowing you, say that those embryos died in a good cause.

However, you must remember we live in the USA. These religionists who excoriate Middle Eastern societies for failing to give women the choice on how to live their lives are absolutely adamant that American women should not be able to choose whether or not to have an abortion.

They also believe that under no circumstances should an embryo be killed because it is important that they grow old enough to possess a firearm in order that they can kill a more developed being. I for one believe that if you have to sacrifice your life you do so in a good cause.

After all, no greater love has a man who lays down his life for his friends and like the good Samaritan we should wonder who our neighbors are. Perhaps you'll consider that all those embryos that went before you were your good neighbors.

This is what really angers me about the GWB era. If you hold any conservative views, no one believes that you believe what you say.

I am pro-life because I'm not sure anyone can know when life is said to begin, so we should probably err on the side of not killing someone.

But if I say that-- I get the respsonse that "no, all pro-lifers are mysogonist fucknuts who don't care about the children at all but want to use pregnancy as a means to keep women down. Also, you hate science and think all sick people should die because God hates them."

Wonder why, after all these years, decent rational Americans would begin to suspect that your right wing Christian leaders are really nothing but a bunch of atavistic patriarchal proto-fascist theocratic authoritarians? Can't imagine. Poor things. You're always so misunderstood.

Utz_the_Crab_chip:

This is what really angers me about the GWB era. If you hold any conservative views, no one believes that you believe what you say.

I am pro-life because I'm not sure anyone can know when life is said to begin, so we should probably err on the side of not killing someone.

But if I say that-- I get the respsonse that "no, all pro-lifers are mysogonist fucknuts who don't care about the children at all but want to use pregnancy as a means to keep women down. Also, you hate science and think all sick people should die because God hates them."

Then here are some moral questions for you. If embryos must be brought to term, do you advocate forcing women of childbearing age to adopt all the existing embryos before bearing their own children since these frozen embryos have greater human standing than their own unfertilized eggs? If not, how do you propose to develop all these embryos? Is it evil that these embryos have come to exist at all? Is it a lesser evil if they are never made in the first place?

i'm your hucklebearer

In writing the article Saletan wasn't opposing any form of research, but rather trying to imbue some sense of understanding in everybody of the other sides' opinions. He is, in my opinion, advocating for a renewed commitment to civility and reasonable argument in the debate. And this applies equally to both sides. For example Ou, you speak eloquently yet forcefully for the pressing need for increased research in the area. Few people could read your post and not at least question their own beliefs. Yet in the same post, anyone who has doubts is dismissed as "religionists". I'm an atheist, and I'm quite conflicted on this issue. Other posts have referred to the broad spectrum of people who have qualms as "wackos", "fundamentalists" etc. Anyone who expresses a contrary opinion, is immediately and negatively pigeonholed, and that's what Saletan is hoping to persuade us away from.

I am pro-life because I'm not sure anyone can know when life is said to begin, so we should probably err on the side of not killing someone.

Do you not understand how this very statement is at odds with other aspects of Conservative viewpoints on governance?

It isn't GWB that is the problem. It is the internal inconsistency of the ideas themselves. That inconsistency has been there for about 70 years, though it was very ably covered up by distractions such as the Red Scare, and Civil Rights turmoil. But the reality is that GWB isn't all that much different than Ronald Reagan in both the policies and inconsistencies espoused.

Lets take your statement as an example. Your

"we should probably err on the side of not killing someone"

as an INDIVIDUAL choice, is not really questionable. But Conservatives also believe (or say they believe) that they want a Strictly Interpreted Constitution, and they want minimal governmental regulation, especially in the realm of "picking winners and losers in innovation".

Yet both of these latter two statements contradict the effort, that your post implies you support, to use the power of The Government to impose your BELIEF about life onto the rest of the public.

Remember that this very same conservative jurisprudential perspective has ruled that

1. The Government cannot be REQUIRED to always act to protect the citizens. That any failure to do so is in the political realm not the Constitutional realm
2. That it is ok for a Government Officer to kill an unarmed citizen in order to prevent further property crime (Justice Alito wrote that memo for the Reagan DoJ).

So what we have here is an inherent contradiction in the positions of Conservatives. Not GWB, but conservative thinking in general.

And you wonder why folks don't believe conservatives when they make various claims about their viewpoints. It sure comes across as those being religious belief driven and not based in reasoning or civic or Constitutional rationale. GWB perhaps was the most honest about this, but he's not the problem you face.

Bravo, degsme!

But that's just it... why is being a conservative an all or nothing proposition? You read one opinion I have about one thing, and expanded that to include my beliefs on killing people for property rights? Please don't try to tell me that GWB didn't exasterbate the "either you're with us or against us" mindset... which it seems that Obama is keeping right along with the wording of this lift of this band.

I will tell you that GWB did not exascerbate the "wid us or agin us" mindset. This was no different than McCarthy, than Nixon's "enemies list", than Lee Atwater's and Newt Gingrich's Politics of personal destruction, Coulter's Treason, Limbaugh's comments about "deranged liberals" etc.

Note that you self-identified yourself as a "conservative" and asked why this indicted your views in the eyes of folks like myself. It is that completely internally inconsistent set of views that makes up what has been considered "Conservative" for the last 70 years.

You might consider reading The Rich which does a good job of documenting how the "modern conservative movement" really has its origins in a wierd mix of biblethumping texas wildcatter millionaires. These guys funded the rise to prominance of McCarthy, Billy Graham and WF Buckley Jr. and subsequent "conservative movement" ideologues.

As such, the conservative principles are an odd hodgepodge that is internally no more consistent than what you would expect from under-educated oil-field roughnecks

What he's objecting to is you laying the blame for everything "evil" at the feet of one set of beliefs, or one political party, or one man (Bush.) It's simplistic.

Besides which, you're making the assumption that just because he called himself a "conservative," HIS definition of conservative somehow matches up exactly with YOUR definition of conservative, AND that he believes ALL of the things you THINK he does. It's judging someone based entirely on one label.

Also, it's pretty hard to persuade someone to see your side when you're claiming that absolutely every single one of their opinion is born out of an under-educated, "rough-neck," hypocritical tradition. Whatever happened to not judging people based on sterotype?

Lastly, to the first poster, I think you should continue to advocate for people with advanced diseases. However, I think it's a mistake to place "people not wanting to die" and "people wanting to save embroys" on opposite sides of the fence. I think, for the most part, pro-life (or anti-embrotic study) people would just prefer that science invest research into OTHER ways of preventing and curing diseases, ones that didn't require the sacrifice of potential human lives.

Well that's not quite what I got from his initial post. What I got from his initial post is more along the talking points of the GOP core these days - that even though GWB claimed to be a conservative and did some things (like the ESC ban) that would be considered conservative, GWB's fuckups were not conservative and that it is a logical fallacy of "guilt by association" to tar all conservative viewpoints as tainted simply because they are associated with GWB.

To which my counter is that the problem with conservative viewpoints is not GWB, but the internal inconsistencies of conservative viewpoints in the first place.

and I do realize the barrier in trying to convince someone of the problems with their viewpoints while pointing out the less than complimentary origins of their viewpoints. But the historical record of where the Republican Party went from being a socially progressive, pro-enterpreneur party, to a pro-military, christian fundamentalist, socially conservative pro-BIG business party is pretty clear. And it IS at the direction of about 1/2 a dozen undereducated oil-field wildcatters who started out as "roughnecks" and who's education was less than stellar.

You can put lipstick on the pig, but it still is a pig.

As for the "pro-life" side of the equation - the problem I think the first poster has is that "pro-life" seems to ignore the life that is actually born human life that is suffering and dying, while engaging in theocratic absolutist rhetoric about clumps of cells that never were going to be implanted into wombs anyway, much less have much of a statistical chance of actually gestating.

It is an internally inconsistent logic. which ties right back to the belief based (rather than comprehensive philosophical based) origins of the current crop of "conservative viewpoints".

Were embryonic stem cells used in your treatment?

degsme:

I will tell you that GWB did not exascerbate the "wid us or agin us" mindset. This was no different than McCarthy, than Nixon's "enemies list", than Lee Atwater's and Newt Gingrich's Politics of personal destruction, Coulter's Treason, Limbaugh's comments about "deranged liberals" etc.

You're right, here. The "wid o again' us" is best shown in the LEFT wing or pro-abortion side. If you disbelieve this, show me where "reasonable" restrictions on abortions are advocated by the left, so as to meet the issue half-way. I'll wait.

As such, the conservative principles are an odd hodgepodge that is internally no more consistent than what you would expect from under-educated oil-field roughnecks

We call that the "big tent", utterly unlike the hodgepodge of incosistent interests in the "rainbow coalition".... right?