I'm on vacation, and I feel like I'm in a time warp. I get to wake up, stroll downstairs, walk outside and pick up a "newspaper". It's called The Palm Beach Post.
"Newspapers" are handy, because if you need a historical record of the stuff you read online yesterday, today's newspaper arrives as a ready-made archive. It's like reading a cached Yahoo News website, except it leaves black stuff on your hands.
It also brings the unique opinions of some fine editorialists, covering the the ideological spectrum from Marx to Engels to Marx. Occasionally, editors will wonder, aloud, why no one is reading their paper, anymore, before realizing in unique unision that it's probably George W. Bush's fault.
At one dollar per week, delivered, it actually costs more to have it removed from our home than brought to it. This is because it arrives as trash, but leaves with the chance for a more useful, recycled afterlife, as, say, Charmin.
Anyway, we get the Post because it has coupons on Sunday. Sometimes my eyes drift from the Best Buy ad, and then I'm made to wonder anew.
I wonder stuff like this: Why does the secular left have so little regard for science? I think I can answer that question, but I'll let you wonder.
Why, in an article this week about MTV's "The Real World", do they refer to a man as "she"? Yes, he had an operation, but while he says he's "she", and wants everyone to play along, every strand of DNA in his body says he's a man. It's empirical, falsifiable, testable: He's male. But denial, sadly, is apparently a team sport when sexual autonomy trumps science.
Every cell in his re-shaped organs? They say he's a man. Every cell in his brain, racked as it is with confusion? They say he's a man. Every cell in his tongue, as he tells reporters he's a woman? They say he's a man. I'm going with the science over the wishful thinking.
Why, in a tirade this week, was a writer upset that an unborn girl was called an unborn girl? The offending item was in the sports section, strangely enough: A mom, six months pregnant, won the 5k race. Someone said something about how her unborn girl may have tied for first. But, the offended said, "The fetus meets no scientific definition of life until it's born."
Well, no, actually. It meets every scientific definition of life. Denial, sadly, is apparently a team sport when sexual autonomy trumps science.
Why has The Palm Beach Post (along with the NTTimes, the WashPost, etc.) backed off its fantastical promises for stem cell research? The editors had told us it would bring healing on miraculous levels.
Of course, they used to echo Nancy Pelosi's belief that it "holds the biblical power to cure," and John Edwards' revivalist preaching that it would make Christopher Reeve "Get out of that wheelchair and walk again," or Senator Arlen Specter's statement that it had the potential to "conquer all known maladies," or Rep. Anna Eshoo's, "We stand on the brink of finding the cures to diseases that have plagued so many millions of Americans..." and on and on.
But that was when it was about embryos. Which means it was about life, and hence, the abortion issue. And abortion is about sexual autonomy. Always has been.
Now that the game has completely changed (adult stem cells hold the same potential, so no killing of embryos is needed, and the abortion debate no longer matters) no one's seeing a need to issue such ridiculous promissory notes. Truth is, as First Things quotes a New York Times science writer in an honest moment, "Such accomplishments are more dream than reality." Now that we don't have the life/abortion issue involved, Scientific American has apologized for itself and the media, for raising false hopes.
Embryonic stem cells are not a miracle cure. The science said otherwise, but denial is apparently a team sport when sexual autonomy trumps science.
I don't know. Maybe I should stop reading the paper. It's not like they run "Calvin and Hobbes" anymore. But it's interesting to read about the Dolphins, and, among other things, watch the war on science. As a skeptic, and a free-thinker, I'm rooting for the forces of rationality to prevail, even in the face of zealotry, naivete, or subservience to a god who has been made-up.
