Pelosi: 'National Institutes of Health Has the Biblical Power to Cure'

http://youtu.be/_kXmpGbGKiw

Voicing opposition last week to the continuing resolution that would fund the entire federal government except for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) delivered an emotional, rhetoric-filled speech on the House floor. Calling the bill a “wolf in wolf’s clothing,” Pelosi said it would result in cuts to biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health.

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“The underlying bill to shut down government, the continuing resolution, is reason enough to object to it because that bill will cost at least one million jobs in the course of the next year,” Pelosi said.

Declaring “we are not here to expand government,” Pelosi went on to reveal something that many of us have suspected for years — that government is the progressives’ god:

It will not only do that, it will cut our investments in the future: in education, in biomedical research – the National Institutes of Health has the biblical power to cure [emphasis added].

Pelosi went on to say, “Where there is scientific opportunity, we have a moral obligation to meet that scientific obligation with the resources to respect the talent, the intellect, the God-given intellect of the science to cure.”

This is not the first time Pelosi has endowed the National Institutes of Health with biblical powers. At a press conference in March of 2011 celebrating the first anniversary of Obamacare, Pelosi made the same claim:

There’s a cut in funding for the National Institutes of Health. This is not a healthy thing for our country because that research has answers. You know that every family in America is one telephone call, one diagnosis, one accident away from needing the kind of biomedical research that can cure–really have the biblical power to cure in a very, very special way and so to cut back on that research is wrong.

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Pelosi didn’t elaborate on the “very, very special way” that the NIH has the “biblical power to cure,” and she doesn’t explain how cutting government funding to the mighty federal government would hamper the Almighty’s ability to cure the sick. Many would rightly argue that a government bureaucracy is not particularly well-suited to delivering health care, let alone biblical healing.

Thomas G. West, professor of politics at Hillsdale College and author of Vindicating the Founders, summarized the progressives’ views of God and government at a Heritage Foundation event:

At least some of the Progressives redefined God as human freedom achieved through the right political organization. Or else God was simply rejected as a myth. For Hegel, whose philosophy strongly influenced the Progressives, “the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.” John Burgess, a prominent Progressive political scientist, wrote that the purpose of the state is the “perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect development of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over individualism; the apotheosis of man” (man becoming God). Progressive-Era theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch redefined Christianity as the social gospel of progress.

Dr. West said the Founders, in contrast, viewed the individual’s existence and freedom as a gift of God and nature rather than a gift of government. “The purpose of government, then, is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people’s natural rights,” West said. “It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.”

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This is a far cry from the progressive vision for America on display in our government. The Founders never intended for Americans to empower government to control their health decisions and they certainly never intended for their progeny to actually deify government and endow it with imaginary supernatural powers.

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