Former Governor Mario Cuomo has recently chided President Bush for his opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells, asserting that Bush's opposition is based solely on his "religious faith." "But our pluralistic political system," clucks Cuomo, condescendingly, "adopts rights that arise out of consensus, not the dictates of religious orthodoxy."

Ahhh...very interesting. It appears that Mr. Cuomo wants to replace religious orthodoxy with an idol made by human hands, the idol of consensus. How do we know? Let's look a bit more deeply into Mr. Cuomo's proposed solution.

Mr. Cuomo offers to put Bush's "proposition...that human life exists as early as fertilization" to the test. "The best way to test that proposition would be to employ a panel of respected scientists, humanists and religious leaders to consider testimony from bioscience experts describing when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject. They would then provide their conclusions to the lawmakers."

At the risk of being too blunt--and one can hardly be too blunt with the likes of Mr. Cuomo--it appears that the sole purpose of such a "panel" is to arrive at Mr. Cuomo's predetermined conclusions. While "consensus" is the god before whom he would have us bow, we should keep our eyes on the beliefs of the small group of idol-makers who actually provide the predetermined conclusions as consensus. It is that hidden faith that determines how the idol is cast.

What is Mr. Cuomo's hidden faith? To ferret it out, we may begin with what should appear to be a contradiction. On the one hand, he argues that "rights...arise out of consensus, not the dictates of religious orthodoxy." An interesting assertion, indeed, and quite revealing of Mr. Cuomo's strange faith. Don't rights arise from our very nature as human beings?

Apparently not for Mr. Cuomo. To say that rights arise out of consensus, means that we have no rights before and independent of consensus. Even worse, it means that rights established by consensus can be abolished just as readily, and replaced by other quite different rights established by a later consensus. That is, according to Cuomo, we have no rights as human beings; we have no rights by nature; or more properly, we have no rights according to our nature as human beings. We have only those rights that people, or a majority of people, or a small panel of people, happen to agree upon--for as long as they happen to agree, and no longer.

A more dangerous and destructive political doctrine could not be imagined, for in abolishing rights rooted in our nature, we shall be quite soon baptizing rights that go against our nature.

"Oh no!," I can imagine Cuomo objecting. "That couldn't happen because (as he notes) it is the panel of experts that will determine when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject."

Really? And just exactly who will pick the panel? And just exactly how is this very small, handpicked group representing society-wide consensus? Shouldn't we be a little worried that they would be chosen to determine an answer that, through government support and coercion makes consensus, even against opposition?

Cuomo mentions the lovely success of just such a panel of consensus-makers, the "Task Force on Life and the Law...operating effectively in New York since 1985 [mid-way through his reign as Governor], devising public policy to address issues like euthanasia, the definition of death, surrogacy births, the withholding and withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment, reproductive technology and other difficult questions generated by rapid advances in medical technology."

Devising public policy?! Task Force?! Be assured the task the panel was given, was to force a Cuomo-friendly policy upon the public. Just such a task force was formed in 1968 by then Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. As he said to the well-stacked Abortion Law Reform Panel, "I am not asking whether New York's abortion law should be changed, I am asking how it should be changed."

As with Rockefeller, so with Cuomo and those like him. Cuomo wants to use human embryos for medicinal purposes, an intriguing spin on the ancient abomination of adults offering children up to their gods so that they can live just a little bit longer and a little bit more comfortably.

And now we see why Cuomo so passionately opposes religion, particularly Christianity, entering the public policy arena. He knows Christianity is opposed to what he wants. Therefore he must silence it by trivializing it.

But again, it is quite clear from Cuomo's moral positions that he is an adherent of another religion, Secularism. The secular religion places a premium on the individual's freedom to do anything without any restrictions whatsoever; it sees human life and destiny in this-worldly, merely bodily terms. Abortion causes it no anxiety, so it has even less regrets for the fate of (in Cuomo's revealingly callous phrase) "leftover embryos." The appeal to a "panel of experts" is merely a useful ruse of establishing Secularism as the religion of the land.

Rather than shrink from Cuomo's self-righteous scold, President Bush should turn the tables on Cuomo and convene a panel whose task it is to uncover the many ways in which the religion of Secularism is, against the constitution and human nature itself, trying to enthrone Disbelief as our established state religion.

Cuomo's Twisted Reasoning

In an attempt to undermine President Bush’s position in regard to stem cells, Mario Cuomo twists the truth of his own professed religion to suit his needs.

He blithely states that “the president…will have to provide more than sincere religiosity to prove that human life exists as early as fertilization, a proposition that even the Roman Catholic Church and other religions have historically disputed.”

Apparently Mr. Cuomo thinks he can count on readers’ ignorance of the Roman Catholic Church’s position—or, being a Roman Catholic himself, he is simply ignorant of that position. As it makes crystal clear in the late John Paul II’s encyclical The Gospel of Life, the Catholic Church argues that “from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth” (paragraph 60). The pope was quoting the Vatican’s position from the Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the top doctrinal dawgs, so to speak. There is no ambiguity nor any dispute.

What Cuomo is playing upon is the right-headed admission by the Vatican that science may have difficulty proving “the presence of a spiritual soul” through empirical data, not whether human life begins at conception. The problem arises because of the very limitations of science.

Speculation Reigns Supreme

Judge John Roberts faces intense scrutiny as nominee for Justice O'Conner's seat on the Supreme Court.

"In the 1992 Casey vs. Planned Parenthood case, which saw the court uphold some state pro-life laws, O'Connor voted with the 6-3 majority to uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court decision that legalized abortion on demand. She called the infamous decision "a rule of law and a component of liberty we cannot renounce.''

"Our obligation is to define the liberty of all. We reaffirm the constitutionally protected liberty of women to obtain an abortion," she wrote. She also cast the deciding vote in the 2000 court case that overturned a Nebraska ban on partial-birth abortions. The Nebraska case had national implications and dozens of bans on the grisly mid-term abortion procedure were overturned as a result. Meanwhile, a federal ban on partial-birth abortions is making its way to the high court and if President Bush replaces O'Connor with a pro-life nominee, the court may reverse its 2000 decision on the legislation."

Cuomo's editorial Not By Faith Alone should have been titled Only The Secular Elite Need Apply

"If the president vetoes a bill that advances that potential, he will have to provide more than sincere religiosity to prove that human life exists as early as fertilization, a proposition that even the Roman Catholic Church and other religions have historically disputed.

The best way to test that proposition would be to employ a panel of respected scientists, humanists and religious leaders to consider testimony from bioscience experts describing when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject."

"If indeed such a panel confirms that Dr. Marburger is right and science cannot supply the proof that human life starts at conception, then the president's position is based only on his particular religious faith. If so, the president, would be wrong to deny the rest of America that does not share his faith the vast potential benefits for embryonic stem cells."

New York Times

Cuomo leaves no room for the possibility that there is controversy in the scientific community about the issue of when human life begins

Wesley J. Smith, a frequent tothesource contributor, rebuts Cuomo's argument

And guess what: According to several eminent texts, a human embryo is indeed human life, just as the president "asserts." For example, the authors of The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (6th Ed., 1998) assert: "Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte [egg] is fertilized by a sperm." The fertilized egg is known as a zygote, which "is the beginning of a new human being." More to the point, the authors write: "Human development begins at fertilization" with the joining of egg and sperm, which "form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized . . . cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual." Similarly, the authors of Human Embryology and Teratology (Third Ed., 2001), another embryology textbook assert that upon the completion of conception, "a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed." (all emphases added)

It is also worth noting in this regard that the prestigious British science journal Nature published an article in 2002 describing how the human body plan "starts being laid down immediately" upon fertilization. "Your world was shaped in the first 24 hours after conception," the Nature article asserted. "Where your head and feet would sprout, and which side would form your back and which your belly, were defined in the minutes and hours after sperm and egg united." The article goes on to note that the newly fertilized one-cell embryo is already a unique human life, not merely the "naïve sphere" or "featureless orb" as scientists once thought

In other words, based on pure biology and embryology--which is science and not religion--fertilization does indeed create a new human life. And if this is true of the one-celled embryo, it is surely true of the same embryo when it has developed for a week to the stage when embryonic stem cells can be derived.

We all know that consciousness does not first appear at the moment of fertilization, nor does viability outside the womb. It seems hardly worth convening a panel to determine what is already known. Cuomo doesn't begin to wrestle with competing claims regarding the moral and biological status of a human embryo at ALL stages of development, including the moment of conception. Oddly, Cuomo wants token religious leaders on the panel, which is curious since he has disqualified religious reasoning as valid for the consideration of purely scientific issues. Wouldn't they create intellectual confusion just as he claims Bush has?

Princeton professor Robert P. George Challenges Cuomo's Premise

Robert P. George: One really does wish that Governor Cuomo would defend his views with arguments. If he really thinks that human embryos are something other than human beings at the earliest stage of their natural development, he should state his reasons for believing such a thing. He should explain to us the basis of his judgment, if it is indeed his judgment, that every major text in the field of human embryology is simply in error on the point. After all, the question of whether a human embryo is or is not a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens is not one to be resolved in the mind of any conscientious citizen or morally serious policymaker by examining public-opinion polling data.

At the same time, it should be noted that Cuomo doesn't even manage to do justice to public-opinion polls on the question of embryo-killing. For what it is worth, polls stating the question in an unbiased fashion tend to show that a majority of Americans do not support the practice of destroying human embryos for biomedical research, and certainly oppose the creation of embryos by cloning for research -- so-called "therapeutic cloning" -- or any other purpose.

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