An excellent post on Dobson's Nazi comments

Earlier this month, James Dobson of Focus on the Family made a comment comparing Nazi Germany to stem cell research. I chose to stay out of this particular debate, because I didn't hear the original broadcast (not surprising, since I don't listen to FOTF) and because I've made pretty clear my thoughts about invoking the Nazi argument.

However, Lee at Lee's Walk made an excellent contribution to the discussion with this post. Here's one key section:

While I heartily agree that embryonic stem cell research represents a serious moral failure, Dobson's analogy breaks down . . . The horrors of the Holocaust were only the final step, the "Die Endlösung"; embryonic stem cell research only represents one small step toward something worse. (Which, of course, is not to suggest that is not bad on it's own merits.)

The experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengelle, Friedrich Mennecke, etc., had very little to do with causing any "good". Almost none of these so-called experiments were designed in any real way to gain scientific knowledge beneficial to mankind as a whole. They were designed to see how best to kill someone and what the effects of particular death-dealing procedures would be. Secondly, embryonic stem cell research (and the procedures designed to gather the cells in the first place) are nothing like Auschwitz or even Hadamar where the goal was to kill as quickly as possible rather than do legitimate research.

It's especially important to read and think about Lee's closing thoughts. Essentially, the horrors of Nazi Germany happened because the German people allowed a series of seemingly small decisions to compound, each pushing the country a little further down the road toward evil, each so incremental that no one noticed the slippery slope toward the gas chambers.

Lee continues:

While the Nazis never committed moral outrages because they wanted to help mankind (well, if you follow their logic they did, but that's another story), they did commit horrors on a grand scale because of the smaller steps which lead up to Auschwitz. [Dobson] is also correct, in my view, in stating that embryonic stem cell research represents a "wedge" in our culture. When we get to point where helpless humans, or, more accurately, humans that have a very small political voice of their own, can be sacrificed to potentially help other humans with a stronger political voice, we should always worry. I'll leave you with the words of another fine researcher, Harold Kaplan, from his book, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust:

When people say "never again" as their chief lesson from the Holocaust, we are at a loss. What is to be never again? And then to treat the Holocaust as some indecipherable horror and mystery . . . is to put "never again" at a total impasse. Those who say "never again" speak of the final result, the "solution." That comes too late for such a vow. The question is, Where, at what point in the Nazi series of crimes, does the "never again" begin to apply?

The first sin was not the gas chambers, of course. . . . We understand that all human rights are connected that a Holocaust is only the last stage of their loss. (pp. 9-10)

It's our job to think critically about the paths we choose, in order to catch ourselves before too many small decisions compound into a conclusion of horrific proportions. Stem cell research is one of those paths, one in which we cannot consider the scientific potential in a vacuum absent the ethical obligations.