“we’ve used words to obscure what we’ve been doing”
Though the headlines are about stem cell research, it’s really all about abortion. Pro-lifers have always known that. Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says it in today’s column.
It has always been about abortion, about the choices we make and how we fight to use or deny human embryos for research — all of it like hands that shape our future culture.
There have been other scientific and funding aspects to the stem-cell debate, but at the retail political level, “stem-cell research” has long been a proxy for abortion rights and for the rights of human life unborn.
So “stem-cell” is code, a slogan, the fact understood by political consultants and their candidates, by the abortion rights groups and the politicians who seek their votes and by those that oppose abortion rights and seek those other votes.
It’s a language understood by pro-abortion and pro-life activists, the politicians and the media. But people in this culture are confused by the words and how they’re distorted. So those who see it clearly need to ask some questions, publicly.
What is the psychic cost of all of this? What debt is incurred by those who survive by destroying life? What of those who come after us? What world do we create for them by entertaining such choices and pretending that technology is without consequence? What happens to us in the act of avoiding these questions, so eager are we at the promise of new discoveries?
I’m sure I’m in the distinct journalistic minority on this.
You and me both, John. We have company, but we are outnumbered in the media that is not as ‘mainstream’ as they think.
Sometimes I wish that those who ridicule us for faith would acknowledge from time to time that their views may also shaped by an equally fervent faith — the belief in modern scientific progress as the means to solve the world’s problems.