From Nancy Pelosi, who should know better, for heaven's sakes:
“Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arguing for the bill’s passage. “And that is the embryonic stem cell research.”
One: This is a gratuitous insult to all thinking persons. Science is a process of inquiry that has enabled us to understand something about the nature of physical reality in a detailed fashion. It has taken centuries of hard, meticulous, and often backbreaking work to acquire this knowledge; the history of science is filled with failure, frustration, and fragmentary, provisional understandings. The relatively rare breakthroughs - Newton's laws, Darwin's natural selection, Einstein's theory of relativity - are achieved only through enormous effort, not miracles. This is no gift from God but a quintessentially human endeavor.
Secondly, the kind of pandering, meaningless bullshit Pelosi mouthed will convince no one. But it does make clear how little a leading Democrat understands religious tropes in a modern political context. The rightwing retort is obvious: "God nowhere demands the sacrifice of human children for research. That's the ethics of Mengele, not Jesus." And from there, the "conversation" devolves quickly into idiotic arguments about when a fertilized egg becomes a human life. And the importance of the research, its potential benefits that are needed now, are forgotten.
Pelosi's breathtakingly stupid comment merely indicates how far behind, still, Democrats are in developing a modern political rhetoric for their values and ideas...
You do not pander to people you can not win over. However, there's the distinct possibility Ms. Pelosi actually thinks this way. Even Ted Kennnedy leads compromises with Bu$hCo on things like immigration. It's not surprising that even with the Democratic majority this Congress is more unpopular with many Democrats than Rethuglicans.
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