Mea Culpa -- I Forgot!

I forgot the First Rule of blogging, high school poli sci essays, and dinner table talk: Never even mention abortion unless you want to spend the rest of the day/class period/meal discussing it.

Let me wrap the whole thing up — at least for this time — with a fine compromise.

Robin Roberts writes:

There is this word called “ethics”. Its subjective. I’m assuming, Stephen, that you have some ethics of your own about what is and isn’t proper research. For instance, I’ll assume you think that involuntary research on people is wrong. Well, some people find that stem cell research is contrary to their ethics. That doesn’t make them “wrong”, because its not a factual question but an ethical one. It means you don’t share their ethics.

If we let “subjective ethics” run our course, then we’re going to have a problem — lowest common ethic. You think it’s wrong to use embryos for research, but some vegan fool can’t stand the idea of the Celery Genome Project. Do we have to go that far?

So here’s the compromise. I won’t have the government take your money to perform research you find unethical, distasteful, whatever. You won’t have the government forcibly stop me from my studies. And we can all laugh at the Flatworm Liberation Front.

Aw, hell — now I’m gonna catch it from the vegetarians, too.