Most people will not agree with Novak’s assumption
After all the public debate on stem cell research, it’s shocking that a columnist of Robert Novak’s stature would find it acceptable to link stem cell research to abortion politics.
In his recent column about Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., Novak automatically assumes that just because a member of Congress is pro-life, he or she automatically must be opposed to embryonic stem cell research. Most of America knows this assumption is a bad one to make and, fortunately, senators like Orrin Hatch and Gordon Smith, as well as Congressman Joe Barton and Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson understand that the two are completely separate issues, support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and can vote accordingly for what is right for America.
In fact, we believe that in the case of embryonic stem cell research, being pro-life means that one supports the quest for better treatments and cures for the 100 million Americans who suffer from cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries and other debilitating diseases and disorders for which stem cell research provides great hope.
President, Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, Washington, D.C.
It was heartening to read the letter – all the way from DC – disentangling the so-called Pro-Life movement from embryonic stem cell research, presumptuously linked by one Robert Novak.
I suppose the coalition president has chased Washington resident Novak all over the country into every newspaper in which his column is syndicated to correct the shockingly shoddy association he implied between the two sensibilities (abortion and stem-cell destruction), under one “unborn baby” umbrella.
Here’s a guy, Novak, who made the considerable effort to convert from Judaism to Catholicism during the last decade, so you know he means business. (And just in case anyone questioned his depth of conviction, he once wore his Ash Wednesday ashes to the CNN studio, literally bearing the cross as he performed on air.)
Mr. Novak is the sort of Catholic who mutters about “class warfare” as he wages it on the powerless poor. The sort of Catholic who dismisses as “Socialism” the very proposition of universal health care and affordable health insurance. The sort of Catholic who, on CNN’s now defunct program “Capital Gang,” having been baited with the notion of even greater tax “relief” for his very wealthy income bracket, reflexively enthused, “I sure hope so!”
Does Mr. Novak represent Catholicism? No, it would be much more accurate to describe him as a hardcore conservative of the compassionless strain. Yet Novak attaches himself to his religion like foreign dictators and tyrants proclaim themselves Atheists – to the detriment of that unalloyed philosophy.
It’s a disservice to both concepts – Catholicism and Atheism, in their purest forms - when practitioners of them shamefully conduct their lives. Perhaps, when Catholics are tempted to disdain Atheism on the basis of wicked, reprehensible behavior on the part of individuals who also happen not to believe in God, they would do well to ask themselves whether Mr. Novak speaks for them.