October 12, 2004 - Superman won’t benefit from stem cell therapies. It is too late for him. His personal 9 year international crusade for medical research in to spinal cord injuries and fetal stem cell research has come to an end. It is too late for me and for millions of us who suffer from diabetes and auto-immune diseases as well. We are told that the advance of medical knowledge that promises a step forward in curing our conditions must be restrained because it is not sufficiently reverent of life. It is better, we are told, that millions of zygotes lying frozen and unused in Petri dishes be simply discarded as they degrade than that they be used to further human knowledge. We are told that an ethical concern for the life that fertility clinics created requires that these man-made products of artificial fertilization not be used to seek to extend and improve human lives already in being and consigned to premature suffering and death for the lack of a cure.

In this political season Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles J. Chaput tells the faithful in Colorado that a reverence for life and the dogma of the Church require the political repression of this line of research; and of the freedom of a woman to end a pregnancy; and of the freedom of a committed homosexual couple to legitimize their relationship under the law. The Archbishop tells the faithful that these three issues compel a vote for George W. Bush – the man whose reverence for life led him to mock the religious conversion of a woman waiting for execution on death row; whose reverence for life led him to accept uncounted innocent deaths as collateral damage in his politically motivated invasion of Iraq.

Suppressing knowledge does not revere life, it worships death and suffering. If employing condoms and birth control pills are forbidden because they interfere with the natural processes ordained by God, why then is the use of penicillin to defeat the natural disease process of death not to be equally proscribed? Is not the life of the microbe created by God as sacred as the life of a human zygote or blastula created by mankind’s intervention in the processes ordained by God? Our government compels no one t to use the lifesaving advances in medical knowledge. No one is compelled to employ artificial methods of birth control or to obtain an abortion. In a free society those decisions are left to the individual to decide for themselves. Each of us is free to reject therapies and medical techniques we find to be contrary to our own ethical considerations and reverence for life. None of us should be compelled by law to prematurely embrace death by rejecting them. That is the essence of liberty.

Knowledge is neither Liberal nor Conservative; it is neither Republican nor Democrat. Knowledge is God’s gift to His children to be used to enhance the quality of the gift of life that He has provided to all creation. When men, whether they have been consecrated as an Archbishop of a religious sect or selected as President of a free nation purport to speak for God and compel the people to reject His gift of knowledge it is simply blasphemy. When that blasphemy is committed in pursuit of secular political advantage it is un-American.