Fib #3 and "After the Truth"

This from a March 21st column by George Weigel:

On March 9, President Barack Obama gave my pro-life mother a nasty 95th birthday present: an executive order rescinding the restrictions that President Bush had placed on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. As policy, the executive order was even more an irresponsible blank check than many had feared it would be, according to Yuval Levin, who once worked on these questions at the President’s Council on Bioethics. Nor did the executive order deign to even nod to the moral debate that has raged around this issue for years. The President tried to do that in a speech announcing the executive order. Yet the speech, containing four fibs and a waffle, was even worse.

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Fib Three: The President claimed that his executive order was the first step in “letting scientists…do their job, free from manipulation or coercion…” This is a favorite Obama rhetorical device: set up straw men, then huff and puff eloquently until the straw man is no more. The truth of the matter, as Ryan Anderson pointed out, is that “critics of embryo-destructive research have never been hostile to science. The dispute is not about whether stem-cell research should proceed; it is about how it should proceed.”

No one who opposes the Obama policy is against listening to scientists; but since when is science absolved from moral scrutiny? Obama seems to think of scientists as secular high priests whose work cannot be questioned or subjected to the legal boundaries erected around every human activity that touches on the integrity of life. Perhaps the insightful German film, After the Truth , in which a fictional trial explores the “humanitarian” rationale for medical “experiments” under German National Socialism, should be screened in the White House theater; I’m sure the good folks at Ignatius Press will donate a DVD.

I'm not in a position to say what Ignatius Press will or will not give the President, but I'm reasonably confident that any such DVD will play in White House DVD players.

Here is some information about After the Truth, which is distributed in North America by Ignatius Press:

This powerful, award-winning film tells the story of one of the greatest challenges the legal system has ever faced. Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” in Auschwitz, and one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, turns himself in after 30 years in hiding to tell his “truth” to the world. Thus ensues a battle between conscience and evil...

After The Truth presents us with Mengele’s hypothetical trial, which forces us to review that judgment, especially in the context of the wider negative attitudes towards the dignity of human life in the German society. The responsibility of our sense of right and wrong is mirrored in the film by attorney Peter Rohm, whom Mengele requests to be his lawyer, and whose idealistic belief in the legal system conflicts heavily with his emotional resistance to defending such a monster. The viewer is presented with Josef Mengele the man, flesh and blood, and must hear him out as he emotionally yet rationally states the reasons for his work, and his supposed “mercy” that he imposed on his countless “patients” - even as some of his former “patients” who survived Auschwitz confront him in court with the horrible things he did to them. As the intense trial proceeds to its dramatic finish, we discover that the dark attitudes about the dignity of human life in Mengele’s day and attitudes in our world today are much more similar than many would think.

Find out more about this excellent film.