When a writer I greatly respect enthusiastically enlarges on an article written by another writer whom I hold in high esteem, it's past time to share what's being discussed with our wonderfully loyal TN&V readers.

The original article--" Science and the Left"--was written by Yuval Levin and appears in current issue of the New Atlantis. (www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/science-and-the-left)

The nub of what Levin argues is thoughtfully explicated by Michael Gerson--"Phony War on Science"--in yesterday's Washington Post. (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/06/AR2008050602446.html)

I don't need to say much to a pro-life audience. For decades we have seen "science" used as a hammer to crush any resistance to the most inhumane proposals. Unless you give "science" a blank check, you were dismissed as Luddites locked in the Middle Ages whose opinions are beneath disdain.

But as Levin/Gerson make crystal clear, the kind of outrageous nonsense we hear today from Sen. Hillary Clinton (the Bush administration has declared "open season on open inquiry" and "When I am president, scientific integrity will not be the exception; it will be the rule") has a long and sordid lineage.

Who can forget, for example, the zealotry of Senators John Kerry and John Edwards  who promised that unlimited government dollars to underwrite lethal embryonic stem cell research would culminate in unlimited medical benefits? Remember Edwards who in 2004 gushed, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again"?

Levin puts his finger on a key weakness of making "science" into a kind of oracle: "Science, simply put, cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."

To which Gerson adds, "Without a firm, morally grounded belief in equality, liberalism has been led down some dark paths." Those paths, decked out in the most high-minded rhetoric, all too often ended in a war on the poor and the powerless. People became objects of "social hygiene," to be "cleansed" from the body politick---eugenics.

Let me offer the most important paragraph in Gerson's op-ed which includes a quote from Levin:

"Nazism largely discredited the old eugenics. But a new eugenics -- the eugenics of genetic screening and abortion, the eugenics of genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization -- is alive and well. Its advocates contend that the new eugenics is superior because it is voluntary instead of compulsory, and unrelated to race.

"But Levin responds: 'Surely the most essential problem with the eugenics movement was not coercion or collectivism. . . . The deepest and most significant contention of the progressive eugenicists -- the one that made all the others possible -- was that science had shown the principle of human equality to be unfounded, a view that then allowed them to use the authority of science to undermine our egalitarianism and our regard for the weakest members of our society.'"

Our business is protecting the weakest, whether they are at the beginning of life or at the end. I would highly recommend you read Gerson, and, when you have a few more minutes, be sure to take time to carefully think through Levin's fascinating article.

Please send your thoughts and ideas to me at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.