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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The bioethics czar's new right-hand man is passionately opposed to abortion, public schools, federal taxes and Democrats.
Nov 30, 2001 | When President Bush last summer picked University of Chicago philosopher Leon Kass to head a new bioethics advisory council, murmurs of approval rose from the pundit class, which swoons for Kass' fashionably unfashionable moralism.
Most of the secular bioethicists struggling with the challenges of cutting-edge medicine and biology plod forward with pragmatic ideas about limiting harm from science. Kass, on the other hand, has always seemed less worried by the practical risks than by what technology is doing to our souls. Sensitive to the "wisdom of repugnance," he has opposed in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and cloning, often citing a personal reverence for the mystery of life. And he has done so from his chair at Chicago's lofty Committee on Social Thought.
That's deep stuff for a panel charged with telling Bush how to think. The stuff got even deeper Friday, when the government unveiled the man selected to serve at Kass' side as executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics.
Kass is no ayatollah -- he's generally considered to be an open-minded academic -- but his newly appointed right hand, Dean Clancy, can come off like a mini-mullah. The 37-year-old Republican, a senior staffer for Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey since 1993, is passionately opposed to abortion, public schools, federal taxes and Democrats. As a Georgetown student in the 1980s, he once made an impression by tearing up his libertarian roommates' porno films with his bare hands.
Prior to working for Armey, Clancy was a speechwriter for Dan Quayle and Jack Kemp. His writing tends to reflect a fanatical verve. In a 1998 letter to a right-wing magazine called the Journal of American Citizenship Policy Review, for example, Clancy attacked Steve Forbes' tax reform plans as namby-pamby, raged against Teddy Roosevelt and called for the repeal of the 16th and 17th amendments, which establish federal taxes and the directly elected Senate.
The federal tax, Clancy fulminated, "bribes the states with their own citizens' money, shackles them with intolerable mandates, forbids them from curbing such crimes as abortion and pornography and now threatens to nationalize health care."
"The moral regeneration of America," he added, "will require, ultimately, more significant reforms."
The other 17 commission members have yet to be announced, but the appointment of Clancy as agenda-setter suggests that the new council will make a radical departure from the bioethics committees of previous administrations.
Clancy replaces Eric Meslin, a hardworking, exceedingly polite Canadian scholar who now heads the Indiana University Center for Bioethics. Meslin oversaw the publication of six thick reports as executive director of Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which met 48 times before disbanding in June. In addition to the issues of cloning and stem cells, NBAC considered the ethics of international clinical trials and experiments on the mentally ill.
Cultural conservatives charged that the NBAC during the Clinton administration was stacked with abortion rights supporters predisposed to accept the destruction of embryos for research. This was true, though NBAC did invite ideologically disparate guests to testify. Clancy's appointment hints at a new ideological fixing for the council.
With Clancy, "They didn't pick someone noted for thoughtful analytic views, they didn't get someone hooked up in the scholarly community. Instead they've gone for a politico," said Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Tipton has good reason to be worried; the charter for the Presidential Council includes long overdue scrutiny of the field of reproductive medicine. There's plenty for Kass and like-minded committee members to feel repugnance about. Most of the science behind the creation of clones and embryonic stem cells derives from unregulated experiments by fertility doctors to help their patients get babies.
But some of Kass' bioethics colleagues say Kass' heavy reliance on "wisdom of repugnance" (others call it the 'yuck factor') -- has not always worked for him, especially in the area of reproductive technology. In the early 1970s, as a bioethics professor at Georgetown University, Kass was an outspoken opponent of the emerging in-vitro fertilization, which he saw as immoral experimentation on the children that were its products.
Kass' essays on the subject, laced with warnings of scientific hubris and quotations from Orwell and Huxley, were ignored by a child-hungry world. With mass multiple births, selective abortions and donor egg sales, there is plenty to feel yucky about in the fertility industry Kass railed against; but it has not produced the mutilated children he warned about. (In a recent interview, Kass said he was OK with IVF for married couples, as long as it didn't weaken families.)
"In a sense Kass is a bit of a technological pessimist," says Leroy Walters, a leading bioethicist at Georgetown.
