Tuesday, August 09, 2005

These people are among you

Another disturbing rant from the right http://mediamatters.org/items/200508090003
James Dobson, leader of focus on the family, compared Stem-Cell research to the tactics done in Nazi Germany.

Here is the exchange as well as the original quote HANNITY: Dr. Dobson, welcome back. Sean Hannity here. I am pro-life. You are pro-life. We believe that life is precious, that it is God-given, that life begins at conception, correct?

DOBSON: Oh, without question. That's right. That's why this issue is so important to us.

HANNITY: And that's why -- you know, if we talk about this, we talk about it come from that vantage point. Because I read your comments. As a matter of fact, I read them a few times. I wanted to make sure we got it right, here.

But you were talking about ethics and morality. And science must be guided by that. You said if any ethics or morality is removed, then you have Nazi Germany. You were very clear. You weren't making a comparison.

DOBSON: Sean, it was only one paragraph that people have overreacted to and distorted, by the way. But the point is that you just cannot kill people in order -- let me put it this way: Science has always been guided by ethics and morality. There have always been things that we could have done and we didn't do because it was wrong to do them.

HANNITY: Right.

DOBSON: That's always been true, except in Nazi Germany. That was the exception, and that's where there was no morality, and there were no ethics. And so to that degree, there is a relationship.

Dobson's original statement, from the August 3 edition of the Focus on the Family radio show:

DOBSON: You know, the thing that means so much to me here on this issue [embryonic stem cell research] is that people talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabetes. There's no indication yet that they're gonna do that, but people say that, or spinal cord injuries or such things. But I have to ask this question: In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. You know, if you take a utilitarian approach, that if something results in good, then it is good. But that's obviously not true. We condemn what the Nazis did because there are some things that we always could do but we haven't done, because science always has to be guided by ethics and by morality. And you remove ethics and morality, and you get what happened in Nazi Germany.

Now what again the psychopaths on the right forget about stem-cell research is the embryos would be discarded if they are not used. They would not be fertilized or anything. And the potential for scientific advances is great.

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