Hypocrisy

In lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, Barack Obama has not only demonstrated a respect for scientific pursuits unfettered by particularistic ideological or religious constraints (the same sort of constraints that lay behind the trial of Galileo in the 17th century, the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, and innumerable other efforts to suppress all speculations in potential conflict with The Truth as promulgated by this or that "higher authority"). He has also given his partisan (as opposed to principled) critics a fresh opportunity to demonstrate anew their underlying hypocrisy. While on the one hand they bemoan his "unprecedented" expansion of the federal government (unprecedented, at any rate, since the reign of his predecessor), on the other they insist that government has a "God-given" responsibility to oversee what goes on in the country's universities, laboratories, libraries, and museums. This in turn points to the fundamental (or should I say fundamentalist?) dichotomy that has plagued the American right (nowadays a.k.a. the Republican Party) at least since the days of Ronald Reagan. For the right's mantra against "big government," against "obtrusive government regulation," is limited exclusively to matters economic, to measures that would somehow interfere with every American's "God-given" right to make as much money as possible. When it comes to issues of privacy, of civil liberties, of freedom to pursue activities (such as scientific research) that do not yield immediate and monetarily measurable profit to someone to one or more individuals, today's Republicans (along with many conservative Democrats) are second to none in calling for a degree of government control that, at least in intent, would have done Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin proud (though these latter figures were admittedly far more ruthless -- or, if you prefer, far more forthright -- than their American kindred of either left or right). Reversing the ban on federally-funded stem cell research is one small but important step in countering such an "un-American" (or should I say "all-too-American"?) tendency toward government-imposed conformity. Expect a far bigger -- and more strident -- battle when the legislative/legal fight over abortion is rejoined.