Neumeyer has this line commenting on stem cells:

"Morality and all that" must be swept aside so that one group of human beings can exploit a class of weaker human beings, mere "clumps." It doesn't occur to Kinsley that the very diseased people he thinks this embryo-destroying research will cure are the ones least likely to survive in the dehumanized, self-centered ethos he's advocating to justify it. He throws down the gauntlet and says in his subhead, "Mr. Bush, don't I matter more than tiny clumps of cells?" One day, probably not very long from now, society will say, "No, Mr. Kinsley, you don't. We don't think disabled adults are valuable." And at that point, what principle will protect him? He belittles bioethicists for marshalling arguments against therapeutic cloning that "are concerned with the nature of humanity and stuff." It is those arguments that protect the weak and vulnerable from the designs of a dehumanized scientific culture.

Kinsley calls Leon Kass "fatuous" in a column full of complacently stupid comments, such as: "is human cloning such a horrific concept that it crosses a line into the territory of Frankenstein and 'Brave New World'? Well, they said the same thing 27 years ago about in vitro fertilization, and that is now uncontroversial." Uncontroversial? The largest religion on earth condemns the practice unequivocally, a teaching that proves more prophetic with each passing year as IVF is the ever-widening door through which all exploitative reproductive science passes.

Kinsley's reckless indifference to rudimentary, Golden Rule morality is seen in his blithe and shamelessly accepting admission that therapeutic cloning will result in organ-harvesting of born children and reproductive cloning: "If we're willing to destroy microscopic embryos for their stem cells, why will we stop before harvesting body parts from advanced fetuses, or breeding babies for their organs? Once we allow human cloning for embryos, how can we be sure no one will bring a cloned embryo to term and produce an actual cloned human being? The answer is that we can't."

And he doesn't care.

Like a lot of stuff on Am Spectator, it's a bit harsh in it's rhetoric, but true in it's assertion...

There is a delicate line that is being crossed here: anyone following bioethics knows that this field has long been, in the words of Nat Hentoff, "apologists for death" rathr than those who "place a fence around the law"...

Indeed, one marvels that Bush found such distinguished pro life ethicists to place on his council...

And those who insist "compassion" justifies killing should read Percy's The Thantos syndrome, where social engineering, abortion, and euthanasia (including for those in famine areas) is justified...leading the ex drunk priest to insist that it is "compassion that leads to the gas chamber"...