Before federal funding of embryo research comes up again

Obama quickly dissoved the bioethics council that might have actually analyzed and critiqued the policy. He prefers a rubber-stamp approach to that of his predecessor.

Last month, President Barack Obama quietly disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics, a deliberative body whose changing cast of erudite and ideologically diverse members had spent the past eight years thinking through today’s toughest moral questions…

It’s ironic that a president often hailed as a sort of philosopher-king regards the discussion of philosophical questions as a waste of time for a bioethics commission. And it’s odd that a leader who talks incessantly about the importance of listening to diverse viewpoints found so little to like about a council that was one of the few vehicles left in America for intelligent, civil public discourse about weighty moral questions.

Oxymoronic, isn’t it?