Mark Daniels Christian Blog and Commentary

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"Stemming" the Rapids

It's another one of those issues that transcends the usual "clanging cymbal" of the battle between left and right. California officials are conceding that a legal challenge by pro-life groups is keeping a state agency from accessing the money they had hoped to raise over the next decade to fund embryonic stem cell research. 59 percent of California voters approved Proposition 71, which created the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and authorized it to distribute out an average of $300 million in research grants annually.   The Life Legal Defense Foundation's lawsuit questions the legality of the Institute, and while such action is pending, no money can be distributed. Kind of like a "legal filibuster," though not one moral progressives would support.

But why is this issue--like abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and cloning--so much larger than Right and Left? Because each of these falls into an area requiring much more scrutiny than the mere will of the people of California. As we discussed last week, the original intent of our founding fathers was clearly to establish a limited government that would restrain the affairs of a religious and moral people, to the benefit of all. I believe that Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison would argue that the embryonic stem cell issue was settled in the Declaration of Independence. Even schoolchildren can recite the passage about the "self-evident truth" that all men are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life.

But in these post-Christian days in America, immoral and irreligious man seeks to alter the very fabric of existence—on vectors beyond the scope of law and legislation. We are playing in the fields of God, seeking to change or interpret the most irreducible factors of life. As the Constitutional "full faith and credit" clause would force an unprotected state to honor another's pronouncement of homosexual marriage, so too would the unconscionable practices—and produce—of genetic experimentation travel across our borders.

If we refuse to honor the self-evident truths of our forefathers, than we must agree as a nation to draw a few permanent, impermeable lines around that which matters most. Indeed, some things are even too big for the "Governator" to handle.