Kissing the Baby

Remember where we left off yesterday, Bush? Talking about image, and making things look good for public consumption? Well, not much later I picked up a copy of the New York Times and there you were, at it again. Kissing the baby. A tender, loving Bush, clutching the innocent, sleeping little baby in his hands, brushing his lips gently at its rosy cheek, with mom looking on, ecstatic, and crowds of other smiling moms in the background.

What a picture! And how shameless, Bush! All this to promote your opposition to the new effort to expand federal funding for stem cell research, and your threat to veto any bill that comes your way. To protect the “lives” of thousands of embroyos—-whose real chance at life is infinitessimal, and whose chance at being perpetually frozen or simply discarded is proportionately huge—-you are willing to sacrifice the lives of countless human beings already living, some of them in great pain and suffering. Science and technology—-also God’s gifts to the human species—-have already begun to sketch out the enormous potential of the stem cell in both healing and preventing untold suffering, but you choose to ignore this source of future miracles in favor of antiquated religious cant.

I might accuse you of playing politics around this issue, Bush. And I do believe that a part of your position is a pandering to your “base” of evangelicals. More frightening still, however, is the thought that this is the genuine Bush that’s speaking here: that our president is a man of profound and stubbornly-held antipathy to anything that science or reason has to offer, a man who clings to a truly primitive, unimaginative, literal-minded understanding of religion and opposes anything that threatens to expose its fears and frauds. To paraphrase a thought of the late Carl Sagan: how is it that such people can’t embrace the vision of a god so good and great as to create a human intelligence capable of such extraordinary advances? Why does their God have to be so small-minded, so incapable of change, so restrictive, so intolerant, so punitive? This is divine wisdom? I just don’t get it, Bush.

Anyway, back to that picture: I only wish you could expand the compassion you show for that mother and child to include the rest of the human species and its suffering. That would be something, Bush. That would really be something.