For the first time since he entered the White House, President Bush has vetoed legislation passed by Congress. Exercising his executive power, he has thrown out a bill that would have allowed government money to fund stem cell research using material from frozen embryos left over from fertilization procedures. In doing this Bush protected the funding ban, which he himself introduced in 2001. He made the announcement in a White House room surrounded by children and their parents who had used frozen embryos from other people to overcome their own reproductive problems. The stunt was supposed to underline the neo-conservative message that embryos, even unwanted, were too precious to be destroyed, even in the name of research into terrible diseases. Bush, who has in the past described work on embryos as “murder”, pronounced that the proposed legislation crossed “a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it.”
There are however problems here. None lies with the president’s argument. It is his consistency that is the issue. Federal funding will continue to be withheld from research Bush considers to be immoral and tantamount to murder. But private funding for the self-same research is still permitted by this administration. Bush has made no moves to stop business investors crossing the moral boundary that a decent society needs to respect. Even if he is advised that he would be defeated politically, should he not be fighting this battle on moral grounds alone?
Another glaring problem is that at the self-same moment that Bush stood in the White House holding forth about the sanctity of human life, even in embryo form, and the moral duty to protect it, his Israeli allies were, with his full and clear approval, bombing Lebanese civilians as part of their campaign against Hezbollah, in contravention of all the tenets of international law and common morality. A wiser man than George W. Bush might have seen the fundamental contradiction in his position at that moment. The president vetoes the destruction of precious human life for research but he countenances it when he believes that it will punish the Lebanese people for being unable to control what he conceives to be a terrorist organization.
He cannot hold both positions. Even if he considers the lives of Lebanese people to be somehow less precious than those of US embryos, bombs and shellfire are still taking those lives away. In his own terms, what is happening in Lebanon thanks to Israel and indeed, no less in Israel thanks to Hezbollah’s rockets, is cold-blooded murder. A world leader whose conscience so pricks him that he has to speak out against medical research using embryos must also speak out against the premeditated butchery of innocent civilians. But what do we hear from the White House but urgings that the Israelis use “restraint”? How unrestrained does Israel have to be in its slaughter of Lebanese, in its systematic destruction of a state only now recovering from previous ruin, before this president remembers his morality?
