They say politics makes strange bedfellows….remember the Witherspoon Council?
These are the fellows who are the BFFs of the two scientists suing to stop federal funding of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. They also wrote a large, very stodgy tome about stem cell research, in which they mentioned me and this blog…kinda implying we are, if not shady, at least misguided. But there were some things in their report that I agreed with too.
I’m not joking and you can check out my critique of their report here.
Two of their members also just recently wrote an editorial piece for the WSJ about what an awful monster that Planned Parenthood is and how it victimizes basically all good red-blooded Americans. Really Planned Parenthood is secretly full of the death-eaters from Harry Potter, which by the way are real, right?
I have a prediction.
Sometime soon, our good friends at Witherspoon will end up on Fox News to trash Planned Parenthood and hESC research!
Heck, that ousted VP of Komen is now at Fox News so at the very least Fox News should have these Witherspoon fellows on as guests, right?
Oops.
As it turns out, one of the authors of the WSJ piece, O. Carter Snead, was actually already on Fox News a couple years ago to talk about how evil Obama’s ideas about health care are (see image above, credit Fox News) and also as it turns out also about embryonic stem cell research with Fox talking head, Glenn Beck.
So in a sense, my prediction came true a few years before I even made it, but I just wasn’t aware!
I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
Anyhow, so what DID Snead actually say?
One thing he said had me laughing as a fellow academic. Snead said “I’m an academic, so I can say whatever I like.”
Good for him! But of course, it’s not really true….
The truly devilish Beck started off one line of the discussion with a sickening, startling question where he extends of the logic of abortion to actual living breathing, breathing people:
BECK: I mean, you could have — you could have killed Ronald Reagan. You could kill any child up to, I think he says, two-ish. I mean, that’s where we’re headed here.
Snead’s response to this dangerous idiocy?
He’s on the same page as Beck–see below.
SNEAD: Yes. You have a situation which there are sub-personal human beings — human beings that are not yet persons or no longer persons. And Dr. Emanuel cites Ronald Dworkin, who espouses a similar view on one of his books.
Now, I have to say one quick thing, though, about unborn children. In addition to devaluing the lives of newborns in that one particular proposal, if you combine the incentives for cost containment with what is likely to be federal funding for abortion, you might very wind up with a regime in which there is a huge pressure on parents to abort a child who has a disability.
And you can understand why people like Sarah Palin are upset about that, people who have children with disabilities. And I think that’s something that we — a kind of discrimination that we need to talk about, not just for those children but also for people who are living with disabilities and are intolerant of imperfection that flows from a regime in which those kinds of decisions are made.
These guys are real “way out there” so given that and also the appeals case to make hESC research funding illegal ongoing, you can bet they’ll be back on Fox News for more craziness.
Also, I really don’t believe they give a hoot about people with disabilities either.
They are not the only foundation suffering from a conflicted purpose…
PINK RIBBONS (TRAILER)
Billions of dollars have been raised through the tireless efforts of women and men devoted to putting an end to breast cancer. Yet, breast cancer rates in North America have risen to 1 in 8. “What’s going on?” asks Barbara Brenner in Pink Ribbons, Inc. a new film now playing across Canada.
This feature documentary visits some of the massive fundraising runs and questions where the money goes and asks ‘who really profits from pink ribbon campaigns?’. We meet women with metastatic breast cancer from the IV League support group of Austin, Texas who openly tell us their stories.
http://youtu.be/3QPZfcYTUaA
It seems nothing changes:
” Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re f*cked.” George Carlin 1996.
Well said.
You’re doing great work on the conservative conflation of traditional bogeymen like reproductive rights and socialized healthcare with hESC research. In line with your predictions, I guess we will also see David Prentice making noises out of the Family Research Council soon.