X-Message-Number: 23549
From: "Aschwin de Wolf" <>
Subject: Leon Kass Learns to Spin 
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 18:23:32 -0500

Leon Kass Learns to Spin

Sage of bioethics wants you to think he knows nothing

Ronald Bailey
http://www.reason.com/links/links030304.shtml

In today's Washington Post, Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council
on Bioethics, pens an op/ed entitled "We Don't Play Politics With Science,"
wherein he tries to explain the appointment of three new members to the
council and justify the sacking of two members who disagreed with him and
the President and.
First, Kass claims that bioethicist William May asked to leave, so that's
fine. But did May ask to go or was he pushed? In December, May dared to
criticize President Bush's flawed Medicare prescription benefit plan, which
might well have put him on a White House hit list. And then, using that
peculiarly oblique form of speech known as "spin," Kass simply praises
University of California San Francisco researcher Elizabeth Blackburn and
then moves quickly on with absolutely no explanation for why she was fired.
Kass then properly cites the genuine accomplishments of the three new, more
conservative appointees; but then, disingenuously, he writes "Their personal
views on the matters to come before the council are completely unknown..."
Say what?
While Kass may affect ignorance of their views on embryonic stem cells,
cloning and so forth, the pro-life Family Research Council has no doubts
whatsoever. "Good News on the Pro-Life Front" declares a headline on the
Council's website. The subsequent article states:
Last week President Bush dismissed two members of his Council on Bioethics
that had strongly supported conducting research on human embryo cells, and
replaced them with three new members that fall more in line with the
President's pro-life views. The new appointees are Benjamin Carson, director
of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University; Diana Schaub,
chairman of Loyola College's political science department; and Peter Lawler,
professor of government at Berry College.
Is it plausible that Kass was unaware of Loyola College political scientist
Diana Schaub's review of the Bioethics Council's own report on cloning that
compared cloning to slavery in the conservative religious journal, First
Things? After all, First Things is a journal to which Kass and many others
of the conservative members of the Bioethics Council have contributed
numerous articles. In addition, Kass and Schaub are members of the
publication committee for Irving Kristol's journal, The Public
Interest-perhaps that joint membership would give Kass a clue as to her
views on various bioethical topics? Maybe Leon Kass heard Professor Schaub's
views from her very own lips when they both participated in a panel
discussion on cloning at the American Enterprise Institute on October 29,
2002? On that occasion Kass surely must have heard Schaub say: "Cloning is
an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the
evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life.
Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized
and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have
greater power. It is slavery plus abortion." Such a forceful statement must
have caught Kass' attention.
And what about a subsequent AEI panel discussion of the Council's new
report, Beyond Therapy, in which they both participated just last December?
There, Schaub declared, "One can reject performance-enhancing drugs and
devices in the name of true human excellence. One can decline feel-good
pills in the name of true human happiness. One can refuse to select and
design or de-select and re-design one's children in the name of true human
love. To make the case against ageless bodies, however-to say no thanks to
the prolongation of one's life-one has to make an argument for human
mortality."
Is Kass also really in the dark about the "personal views" of new Council
member Peter Lawler? Lawler, who is a political scientist at Berry College,
participated in the same AEI panel discussion on Beyond Therapy last
December with Kass and Schaub. At the AEI conference Lawler commended that
report's discussion of psychopharmacological advances by saying: "So this
report is strongest when it is clearest that our pharmacological attempts at
mood control will be yet another failed escapist solution to the problem of
our obsessive individualism." It seems implausible that Kass would be
unaware of Lawler's review of Beyond Therapy at National Review Online.
(Readers of this column might be amused by Lawler's strained commentary,
"The Libertarian Threat to Human Liberty".")
Kass and Lawler were both participants in the LeFrak Forum Symposium on
Science, Reason and Democracy at Michigan State University in 2003. Even if
Kass didn't look up Lawler's remarks, his general point of view might be
discerned by the LeFrak Forum's stated goal of introducing "thinkers from
the classical liberal, libertarian, and conservative traditions and other
dissenters from reigning academic orthodoxies." (Note: Curiously no
libertarians were listed for the 2002-2003 series.) I do suppose it's quite
possible that Kass missed Lawler's fulsome footnote praising Kass'
opposition to biotechnological progress in an article in Modern Age: "For
the latest and particularly eloquent and comprehensive statement concerning
the danger to human liberty and dignity of the contemporary interdependence
of biological rhetoric and biotechnology, see Leon R. Kass, 'The Moral
Meaning of Genetic Technology,' Commentary, Vol. 108 (September 1999)." But
still.?
And what about the views of Johns Hopkins University pediatric neurosurgeon
Benjamin Carson? Are they as opaque as those of Schuab and Lawler to Kass?
Carson is a truly gifted clinician, not a member of the chattering classes,
so he leaves less of a paper trail than Schaub and Lawler. Carson, who
describes himself as a committed Christian, is a member of the Seventh Day
Adventist Church. When asked on a website celebrating his achievements,
"What has your work as a brain surgeon taught you about God and faith?"
Carson responded: "I see a brilliant and logical God. With every patient and
every surgery, I am struck by the miracle of life and the miracles possible
within it." Perhaps as Dr. Carson serves on the Bioethics Council he will
agree with other believers that the healing power offered by
biotechnological progress is a gift from God to ease the sufferings of
humanity, rather than an evil to be resisted. We shall see.
In the end Kass may have left himself a bit of wiggle room by saying that
the Council is moving "away from issues of reproduction and genetics to
focus on issues of neuroscience, brain and behavior." Why council members
like Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon, Valparaiso University Professor
of Christian Ethics Gilbert Meilander, and Princeton Professor of
Jurisprudence Robert George are more qualified to deliberate on those issues
than Blackburn and May are is not at all clear. Of course, it is probably
just a coincidence that that all three are frequent contributors to First
Things?
Kass simply cannot with a straight face make the claim, as he does in
Washington Post, that the "personal views" of Schaub and Lawler are
"completely unknown" to him. It's a shame that the White House has somehow
persuaded a man as smart and principled as Leon Kass to deny in public what
he must in fact know to be so.


Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.

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