Atheist Revolution repost the press release from The Secular Coalition for America calling on President Bush not to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.
Friday, June 08, 2007
The Secular Coalition for America has issued an excellent press release (which I am reproducing in its entirety below) pointing out what is at stake with the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. This is the same issue they recently took up by asking us to e-mail President Bush to urge him not to veto this bill. What I really like about this press release is how it frames the issue as Bush imposing his theology on all Americans by impeding medical research that could benefit us all. I believe that this is an accurate and terrifying characterization.
“It is Cruel for the President’s Theology to Influence Medical Research”
President Bush: Sign the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act - Do not Impede Medical Research
Statement by Secular Coalition for America Director Lori Lipman Brown
Washington, DC – June 7, 2007 -- The Secular Coalition for America strongly urges President Bush to sign the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (S.5), which passed the House today. Medical experts agree that embryonic stem cell research has great potential to help alleviate or even cure many devastating medical conditions.
Last year, President Bush falsely equated each embryo with “unique human life with inherent dignity,” and claimed that stem cell research supported “the taking of human life.” In fact, the stem cells used in medical research are actually taken from blastocysts, spheres of 100-200 cells five to six days after fertilization of a human egg. Imbuing such collections of cells with the qualities of an individual fully formed person, is a theological position, not a scientific or medical one.
The Secular Coalition for America believes it is cruel for the President's personal theology to dictate the limits of medical research.
The President now has a chance to allow the National Institutes of Health to use the most promising materials in its research. These excess cells, developed during in vitro fertilization procedures, are scheduled to be destroyed. The Secular Coalition for America calls on the President to allow these cells to be diverted away from the trash bin, and towards what may prove to be lifesaving uses.
According to recent polls the majority of Americans support the use of embryonic stem cell research. The Secular Coalition for America joins with the majority of the members of both houses of Congress and with the majority of Americans, when we ask of President Bush to please not allow his personal religious belief to interfere with advances which may someday lead to the alleviation of tremendous human suffering.
If you have not already contacted Bush about this important issue, please consider doing so now.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Hiding behind God
Tony Blair did more than anyone to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and popular culture.
The next few months will see a deluge of Blair assessments and pundits will argue for years about his legacy. But for humanists and secularists he's been, at best, a mixed blessing.
No one has done more to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and public culture and this has had nothing but a destructive influence on our hard-won secular settlement. Ever since he surfaced - the young lawyer with the good hair and intense eyes - there's been something of the evensong about him. Something earnest and preachy. His sign-off in Sedgefield was like a microcosm of his premiership - thrilling and convincing, marred by the spectre of Iraq, but at the end, carrying the unmistakable whiff of incense, with the suggestion that he had been a blessed leader of a blessed country.
Blair's preacherly tone has emboldened all manner of scriptural bureaucrats and self-appointed faith leaders eager for a public voice - from Iqbal Sacranie to John Sentamu to Cormac Murphy O'Connor - to believe that religion is squarely back on the agenda. Politics, the balancing of competing claims and limited resources, the art of the possible, of compromise and consensus, has been fatally distorted by the reintroduction of holy book-inspired moral certainties.
Blair's bowing to religious thinking and active support for the burgeoning of the faith industry in the political arena is having all kinds of negative consequences. In the March issue of New Humanist, we published Francis Beckett on the way Blair's city academy policy provided a back door into education for religious special interests. The cover story of the current issue reveals how bishops are now arguing for the continuation of their anachronistic and undemocratic presence in the legislature by suggesting that it is the idea of the separation between church and state that is the anachronism, and that, in the words of one Lord Spiritual: "The 21st century has seen an awakening of consciousness in public life of the importance of religion, faith and belief." That acceptance of religion as a benign political force is largely due to the style and disastrous faith agenda of our outgoing premier.
Such newfound confidence in religion as an alternative to politics has become de rigueur internationally too. Blair has found common cause with several leaders of putatively democratic countries who seem happy to accept scriptural explanations, and propose spiritual solutions, for critical social or environmental problems. George Bush's response to the Virgina Tech massacre was to suggest that solace and the resolution of the battle between good folks and baddies lies in prayer rather than, say, a frank discussion of American gun laws.
In Australia, John Howard, another active Christian, has spent years pooh-poohing climate change warnings only to find his country facing the most serious drought in its history. His solution? "Pray for rain."
Back in Britain, we look forward to the end of the Blair era signalling an end to the fallacious idea that the solutions to the intractable problems of the current time - inequality, social disengagement, environmental disaster - are to be found through prayer or divine intervention, rather than in the grubby, compromised human world of real democratic politics and evidence-based argument.
We don't yet know what Gordon Brown might do with the faith agenda, or how long he might have to do it. But we hope he, or whoever in the long term comes after Blair, has noticed that the British people don't like preaching.
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