I didn't rush this column. I didn't provide instant analysis following the president's speech – even though he said just what I expected him to say days before the talk to the nation. I thought about what he said. I analyzed the reactions carefully. I held my tongue. I didn't shoot from the hip. I had hoped that my outrage over America's rapid slide down the well-trod path of immorality and relativism would subside.
It has not.
The issue of life and how we view it is the great dividing line of our time. When people fudge on this issue, when they moderate on it, when they compromise on it, you can be sure they will fudge, moderate and compromise on anything and everything else in their lives.
And make no mistake about it, the stem-cell debate – despite the euphemistic, scientific-sounding name – is ultimately about life, when it begins, when it ends and who decides. Today it's babies for sale, spare parts engineered from embryonic organs. Tomorrow, because of this decision, the government could be coming for your organs or those of your children. After all, the greater good is what we have to consider.
What Bush's decision did was establish that the U.S. government will support experimentation on living human tissue. He may think he imposed limits on such experimentation, but, in reality, he opened the door to unlimited, unrestricted, wholesale research on living human tissue.
Bush will be remembered as the man who provided incentives to research that would make Josef Mengele proud. The day is coming. Mark my words. It's just a matter of time now.
This is utilitarianism at its worst. Bush's decision is to provide federal research money to work on embryos killed for that specific purpose. Only those who believe they have a right to play God and decide that some human life is more valuable than other human life could come to such a conclusion.
Meanwhile, most Americans have no idea what to think about all this. They have been morally and intellectually dumbed down through years of government schooling and media manipulation. And that's why another holocaust is not only a good possibility in such an environment, it's practically an inevitability.
Bush needn't have resorted to the intellectual gymnastics and moral soul-searching to decide this issue. All he really needed to do was to understand the founding documents of the United States of America and to apply them to this issue.
A dose of Jefferson would have cleared things up for him.
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical,” said Thomas Jefferson in 1779.
Yes, bad enough to confiscate money from people by force to propagate opinions they find abhorrent. Worse yet to confiscate money from people by force to support actions they deem murderous and evil. And that's what Bush has done – again.
This is what we might have expected from Bill Clinton – maybe the rhetoric would have been a little different. And this is what I truly expected from George W. Bush. But I'll bet many Americans who supported him believed his pro-life rhetoric. I'll bet many are disappointed in his unprincipled stand designed only to broaden his political support – designs certain to backfire in the long run.
Once again, the more things change the more they stay the same. I'm beginning to believe it is impossible to move America back to a constitutional free republic through the thoroughly corrupted political process. I'm beginning to believe America is simply too morally compromised as a nation to find its way home. I'm beginning to believe that the deliberate dumbing-down process in the schools and media has achieved its goals with little hope of reversing the trend.
This may seem like a fatalistic conclusion. After all, this is just one more presidential decision among many, right?
Wrong. This is a landmark. This is a benchmark. This decision will go down in contemporary history in significance right along with Roe v. Wade. This is bad news. Real bad news.
(Joseph Farah is editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com. You can email him at [email protected].)
