November 05, 2003

Science & religion don't mix

The Traditional Values Coalition has targeted NIH as its latest enemy in the culture wars. It seems to think it knows more about what sort of scientific research should be done than the scientists do, and it's created a list of "questionable" projects and forwarded that list to its Republican allies in the House.

The group's call for Justice Department intervention is the latest volley in an escalating war of words and actions in recent weeks between the Washington-based religious group and the NIH and its congressional and institutional supporters, who see the attack as part of a larger effort to foist conservative religious values on the federal scientific enterprise.

[snip]

The agency is internationally renowned in part for its system of scientific peer review, in which committees of established scientists decide which grant proposals have the scientific and medical merit to deserve funding.


Naturally, the coalition's Republican friends also seem to think their scientific knowledge needs no enhancement, so they want to attach strings to NIH. Most of these studies pertain to human sexuality and the possibility of disease transmission, and are used to devise public health policy and strategy, but what the hell. The Christian thing to do is to condemn people to lives of sickness and worse, because "those people" aren't "our kind of people" anyway. Sometimes I think the Traditional Values Coalition might be happier living under sharia law in Teheran. Of course, that sort of belief is part of the reason why many Middle Eastern societies are economically and socially under-developed, but since the Coalition really wants to move American society back to, oh, 1950, not a problem, right?

Posted by Linkmeister at November 5, 2003 10:16 AM
Comments

I just spent a few minutes reading through some of the TVC articles and now I feel a stronge urge to be disinfected. They've done a yeoman's job of painting intolerance with a couple of coats of respectability.

Posted by: Raye at November 5, 2003 11:32 AM

They can believe what they want, but I wish they'd get enough smarts to know to shut up about things they know nothing about. Faith-based science temporarily derailed Galileo, but he won in the end.

Posted by: Linkmeister at November 5, 2003 12:46 PM

I think the nation is going back to 1950's in many ways.
The government is intervening in our private lives way too much, and I get very upset when I read about clamping down on science. If it weren't for science, most of us wouldn't even be here right now..

Posted by: toxiclabrat at November 5, 2003 01:51 PM

They won't shut up because they do believe that science is horribly flawed at best and something akin to blasphemy at worst. These folks are Bible literalists and the twain ain't gonna meet between science and theology for them. Which is fine, but they have a (religious) moral imperative to protect the rest of us from ourselves and the abuses of science (as they see it). No, they won't shut up. Not any time soon, at least.

Posted by: Raye at November 5, 2003 05:24 PM

Argh! It's getting spookier everyday.

Posted by: ali at November 5, 2003 09:49 PM

The real question is :
Should CBS air the story on the Reagan's???

Posted by: tina at November 6, 2003 12:43 AM

Tina, given what the Kennedy family has had to put up with over the years from Hollywood, sure.

Posted by: Linkmeister at November 6, 2003 07:51 AM

I for one am going to see the Reagan movie. Why are they portraying Ronnie as some sort of God anyway??
Nancy is enough fuel fodder to be a weekly series..make that a daily series...
Givin' him a jar of jelly beans when he was shot..gimmie a break..pure photo op...

Posted by: toxiclabrat at November 6, 2003 10:14 AM