Obama’s ideological fix

Stuart Reid Charterhouse
‘Barack’s name ain’t Jesus. Barack ain’t gonna improve your child’s reading score. There are things we’ve got to do on our own.” Thus the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor, speaking last week in Selma, Alabama.
The Rev. is right. Barack’s name is indeed not Jesus, and some of us occasionally go so far as to wonder quite how “committed” a Christian the new President is. In fact, whenever I see him described as a “committed Christian”, I am reminded that tabloid reporters like to use of the term “devout Catholic” to describe any Catholic who is not a publicly declared Satanist or Germaine Greer.
Wright, the rather droll black power preacher best known for his “God damn America” sermon, was not only right about Obama, but spoke like a Christian gentleman (whether or not he is one) in showing both an independence of spirit and a contempt for liberal individualism. The Black American Nation has to help itself...
Barack, of course, is not part of that nation. Along with Michelle and the kids, he is a naturalised citizen of Ivy League America.
He is a preppie president, the representative of rich, white secular liberals, including just about every airhead in Hollywood; and on Monday he gave these people the fix he’d promised them last year: wider use of human embryos in medical research.
In lifting George W Bush’s restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research on Monday, Obama declared that scientific policy decisions would in future be “based on facts, not ideology”. Oh, really? Just try getting work on a government-funded stemcell project in the United States if you are a pro-life Christian with 16 children and 48 grandchildren and a tendency to talk about the Fatherhood of God.
Embryo experimentation is an ideological matter through and through. It is part of the utilitarian, Goddenying worldview – described in another context by Pius XI as “Satanic optimism” – that drives not only the United States but Great Britain (and the rules here are far more permissive than those in America).
Respectable people everywhere are thrilled. The headline on the Guardian’s leading article on Tuesday was: “Welcome back to the 21st century”. The Guardian is in many ways an admirable newspaper, and I believe what it says about these things. On Tuesday it said that “the rejection of his predecessors religious conservative approach to the stem-cell issue was total”.
So there you have it. In some ways the rejection of conservative religion seems almost as important as any possible cures, of which so far there is no sight. Everywhere there is a mood of elation bordering on hysteria. “It is a relief to know that we can now collaborate openly and freely with other scientists in our own university and elsewhere, without restrictions on what equipment, data, or ideas can be shared,” said Doug Melton, Harvard’s stem-cell institute co-director.
It’s as though Doug wishes us to believe that under the Bush terror scientists had been too cowed to talk to one another. But American scientists were able to do pretty well what they wanted in the Bush years. Their freedom was not restricted. The only restriction was on government funding, and now that restriction has more or less gone.
All this is going to be good for business. As soon as the news emerged on Friday that Obama was going to lift the restrictions, Wall Street jumped for joy and shares in biotech companies shot up.
As John Cornwell pointed out in the New Statesman in January, there is big money to be made in embryonic stem-cell research because you may be able to patent embryonic stem cells, but you can’t patent adult stem cells.
Professor Geoffrey Raisman, of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, told Cornwell: “Adult stem cells are much more promising therapeutically; they’re already in use for such things as skin grafting, but they attract less funding and much less interest because they can’t be patented.” Anthony Ozimic, political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), thinks that it is rather more complicated – and sinister – than that. He believes that research on embryos is pursued as an end in itself and will probably never result in treatments.
“The scientists conducting human embryo research are attracted by what they wrongly believe is a new frontier, and the chance to be revolutionary in turn attracts funds,” he says. “What’s more, Robert Winston has said openly that he is playing God and that’s what embryo researchers should be doing. Hubris is overtaking science.” Meanwhile, said Ozimic, adult stem cells have delivered benefits to patients in the case of more than 80 different medical conditions.
Still, we should guard against party political fingerpointing. Perhaps Obama is just a more honest liberal than his opponents. Many Republicans, after all, support funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Nancy Reagan is one.
Just before last year’s presidential election, John McCain turned against federal funding, having only a year earlier been in favour of it. Maybe he was converted. Maybe not. You don’t always know quite where you are with the war hero, or for that matter with people who call themselves conservatives.
Yoko Ono said last week that Liverpool Cathedral’s plan to play “Imagine” on its bells had brought her to the edge of tears. She’s not the only one. I almost wept too, though mainly with laughter.
As Richard Littlejohn says (in his inimitable way), you couldn’t make it up – except that you could.
Just before Christmas I wrote an item about the horrors of the corporate carol service and having to listen to “a ruffed and cassocked choir singing ‘Imagine’...” In a moment of scruple, I almost pulled that gag, on the grounds that it was too wildly improbably to be funny and was, therefore, nothing more than a gratuitous sneer.
I am grateful to the far-sighted editor for telling me not to yield to my scruple.