Of course he did: President Obama campaigned for office promising to heal our divisions and build bridges across our cultural divides. But he has intentionally and I believe maliciously—at least in the sense that he wants to poke cultural conservatives in the eye—governed in the most divisive manner of any president in my ever lengthening memory. Regarding matters relevant here, consider the recent wholly aggressive “Free Birth Control Rule” attack on the free exercise of religion.
In the stem cell arena, Obama not only canceled Bush’s minor funding restrictions—itself originally hailed as a fair “compromise”—which was keeping a campaign promise, so fine. But on the same day, he also revoked the very kind of policy that promoted the “purple” governance he claimed to want, e.g., Bush’s directive that funding priority be given to funding non embryonic—and hence, societally uniting sources of pluripotent stem cells—even though they had already been discovered in the induced pluripotent stem cell breakthrough.
Now, he has canceled federal support for “Snowflake Babies,” which helped connect women willing to gestate frozen embryos to families wanting them adopted, thereby allowing these embryos to fulfill the purpose of their creation. From the Washington Times story:
The federal government’s only program aimed at preventing the discarding of “extra” frozen human embryos is itself in danger of being discarded. In a move that pro-lifers are calling more evidence of the Obama administration’s “pro-abortion slant,” the White House has sought to defund the Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign in its fiscal 2013 budget. The Department of Health and Human Services “is not requesting funds for this program” because “the Embryo Adoption program will be discontinued in FY2013,” HHS officials said in a February funding report to Congress.
Now, I believe we have to cut the federal budget to prevent us from capsizing as a country like that Italian cruise ship driven on the rocks by its captain. (The analogy is quite apt, now that I think of it.) And if that program had to go, it had to go.
But I don’t think the revocation was about money. This administration has a pronounced antipathy to anything that comes close to “pro life,” “conservative,” or “traditional values.” Make no mistake: Cancelling a small program possibly resulting in a couple fewer frozen embryos being born was about symbolically spitting in his political opponents’ faces. Divide and conquer.(Upper photo of a Snowflake Baby being held by President Bush taken by WJS in the East Room of the White House after a presidential speech July 19, 2006.)
