Last week the subject of restoring "sanity and science" to politics came up in Cynthia Tucker's and Maria Cocco's columns and even in the Doonesbury comic strip. But sanity is often in the eye of the beholder.
In Soviet Russia, people who opposed Communism were deemed insane and whisked off to psychiatric prisons where they were subjected to brainwashing. Politics often trumps psychiatry, even in this county. Homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness. Once the gay libbers got into politics, psychiatry reversed itself and now people who disagree with gay libbers are considered mentally ill.
Science is now getting politicized, especially in stem-cell research. Liberals refuse to distinguish between adult stem-cell research (ASCR) and embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR). If you're against ESCR, you're blasted as being against all stem-cell research as well as being anti-science and a flat earther. But real cures have come from ASCR, not ESCR. Liberals claim quite rightly that that they are against using slurs like the F-word for gays and the N-word for blacks because it's dehumanizing. Yet they use their own dehumanizing terms for unborn babies, like embryo, fetus, zygote, and the newest, blastocyst. Doesn't sound very human, does it?
They also offer more legal protection for animal tissue than human. They say "fur is murder," and "meat is murder" for animals. The ESCR advocates also use the utilitarian argument for human tissue. They say, "We already have the blastocysts, so why not use them?" They don't accept that argument for animal tissue, like ivory. When elephant poachers are caught, no one argues, "The elephants are dead, so why not use the ivory?" No, the poachers' weapons, vehicles and ivory are doused with gasoline and burned. A lot of liberals don't really want sanity and science in politics; they want their politics defining sanity and science.
