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Bioethics: Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress. So supporters are embracing research they once opposed. California's Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not — either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells. Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were...

Bioethics: The former director of the National Institutes of Health, once an enthusiast for embryonic stem cells, now says their future has "dimmed." So why is the administration bailing out research into such therapies while troubled states like California have committed billions?Aside from creating or saving a few research jobs, the administration's decision to federally fund embryonic stem cell research is, as we've noted, a bailout of bad science. It throws money at an avenue of research that time and adult stem cell progress have passed by. Applauding the administration's move was Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who echoed the claims...

Science: The president's Council on Bioethics is summarily dismissed when it disagrees on the need for more federally funded embryonic stem cell research. The scientific method doesn't include firing those who disagree with you.Inspectors general are apparently not the only ones to pay for annoying the White House by doing their job. The 18-member council existed to provide the president with advice on the moral and ethical implications of the rapid advances in science and medical research. It exists no more. The council existed to ponder whether we should do something just because we can. Apparently President Obama wanted not...

LifeNews.com Note: Joseph Infranco is senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.   On March 9, with a stroke of his pen, President Obama signed an executive order that provides federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The president’s terse but chilling justification was that “science should trump ideology.” The statement is a masterpiece of legerdemain, disguising its false premise and frightening implications while miscommunicating the nature and meaning of science. The first...

"President Barack Obama says human cloning is ‘dangerous, profoundly wrong' and has no place in society." So claimed the President as he lifted the restriction on embryonic stem cell research. To be clear, the restriction imposed by former President Bush didn't ban embryonic stem cell research -- it banned the use of Federal dollars in such research. President Obama's statement that human cloning is "dangerous and wrong" is a non sequitur in its context, because there is no material difference between abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning. They differ in appearance, they sometimes differ in ends, but they differ...

He garnered the majority of Catholic votes in the 2008 election, but a number of Catholic groups now say President Obama is showing a complete lack of regard for their beliefs. They count his decisions to lift restrictions on abortion and stem cell research among the most offensive. "As far as the Catholic church goes, there's no bigger priority for Catholics than human dignity and human life," said Cathy Ruse, senior fellow at the Family Research Council said. "And the Obama administration has just been an assault on those values again and again in just two months." But some American...

Here's the final installment of the E-mail debate between conservative Catholic legal scholars Robby George and Doug Kmiec over whether President Obama's executive order on embryonic stem cell research authorizes federally funded human cloning. In the first E-mail in this post, Kmiec responds to George's point-by-point analysis of Obama's new embryonic stem cell research policy, arguing that Obama's policy will very likely outlaw human cloning. In the second E-mail, George closes the debate by decrying Kmiec's definition of human cloning and invites him to debate the matter in public.

I was shocked to hear from two sources that Obama is going to rescind Bush's policy of using Federal money from going for NONembryonic stem cell research. So Obama wants Federal dollars for immoral embryonic stem cell which do not work, but wants to take away money for ethical stem cells which DO work!

It seems to me that many on the cultural left are, while secular when it comes to conventional religion, very much believers in something that might be called secular religions—the religion of global warming, the religion of embryonic stem-cell research.My Creators Syndicate column discusses the Obama budget and how it caters to the religion of global warming by imposing huge costs on what now is an ailing economy in order to fight disasters which we are told will strike us—we area told that there can be no argument—you must have faith!—40 or 50 years from now.As for embryonic stem-cell research,...

15 March 2009Darwinists Tie Themselves Into Knots Denying the Obvious Some Darwinists will say anything to try to draw attention away from the obvious. The point of my “Scientific Certitude” post was to show that evolutionary theory has been used to support racist views. Darwin was a firmly committed racist, and he was not shy about expressing his racist views: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,...

News to Note: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint March 14, 2009 In this issue: 1. AP: “More Americans Say They Have No Religion” 2. LiveScience: “Scientists See God on the Brain” 3. ScienceNOW: “Arrest That Chimp!” 4. BBC News: “Obama Ends Stem Cell Funding Ban” 5. ScienceDaily: “Live Evolution Witnessed In Controlled Environment Of Microbial Predator And Prey” 6. Washington Post: “The Genesis of a Debate” (The Washington Post follows along on a creationist journey through the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) And much more at the following link:

...President Obama’s reversal of the embryonic stem cell ban sentences these embryos to the category of disposable life, a clear indicator that the president values the free exercise of science over the life of the unborn. But there is much more to the president’s decision. Dr. Guliuzza continued:

When a Democratic president goes from being wrong to being damn wrong is always an interesting moment: Bay of Pigs, Great Society, Jimmy Carter waking up on the morning after his inauguration, HillaryCare. Barack Obama condemned himself (and a number of human embryos to be determined at a later date) on March 9 when he signed an executive order reversing the Bush administration's restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research. President Obama went to hell not with the stroke of a pen, but with the cluck of a tongue. His executive order was an error. His statement at the...

In addition to overturning former President Bush’s policy against taxpayer funded embryonic stem cell research, President Obama rescinded Bush’s policy authorizing federal funding for adult stem cell research. Obama said it was a “matter of conscience” that motivated his decision. “I see no reason why taxpayers should be forced to fund research into unproven technologies and using methods they may find morally repugnant,” the President said. “Sacrificing embryos to obtain stem cells is one thing. Sacrificing adults goes beyond what I think is tolerable for a civilized society.” The President pointed out that “those who believe in adult stem cell...

On Wednesday, President Obama signed a law that bans federal funding of any research that leads to the destruction of human embryos just two days after lifting Bush-era restraints on it. President Obama may have abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on federal funding of stem cell research on Monday, but a legislative obstacle still remains for scientists seeking more money. A spending bill that Obama signed on Wednesday explicitly bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death," language that pertains to creation of new...

Obama Orders the Destruction of Human Embryos by Lawrence Ford* In a significant move to distance himself from the moral conservatives of the country, President Barack Obama on March 9 ordered that federal money (taxpayer money) be used to promote medical research using harvested embryonic stem cells from humans. Dr. Randy Guliuzza, a medical doctor and National Representative at the Institute for Creation Research, commented this week on the Obama decision: The consequences of the president’s decision are two-fold. First, government is now more empowered to destroy human life for “scientific” progress. Will research on human embryos result in advances...

I'm really never going to get over how much fun this charade is to watch. On Monday, the glorious b. Hussein proclaimed how he hit "select all, delete, save" (for you original Mac folks) on the Bush administration executive order banning embryonic stem cell research. Then on Wednesday, b. signed the $410 billion omnibus bill, so his socialist soul train could roll on through the end of the fiscal year. Not to be outdone, he took to the pulpit (reading from his Golden Teleprompter, of course) and chastised lawmakers (particularly those supposed "Republicans," who, we admit with grinding teeth, disgustingly...

Embryonic Stem Cells: The science is not settled and neither are the ethical questionsBoth sides of the stem cell debate have brought up valid arguments, but the President is seemingly uninterested in them. In a dramatic rhetorical flourish, he has imperiously declared that he is throwing back the curtain on President Bush's scientific dark ages. Good politics, but bad for our humanity. While our still-Christian society in the US grapples with concepts like euthanasia and abortion, the President blithely brushes these issues aside. His attorney general wants us to stop being cowardly and to start talking about race, but this...

SHORTLY AFTER the president announced his new policy on funding embryonic stem-cell research, CNN's Larry King devoted a special program to the subject. His first guest was Mary Tyler Moore, the international chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation who has long been involved in raising funds and awareness for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there is still no cure. "I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. I think it's a good one," Moore told King. "What's wonderful too is that this means that the United...

<p>Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.</p>