“Stop the hate!” we are often told. To be sure, that is a worthy goal. Indeed, in recent decades great strides have been made throughout society in accepting most of us, as indeed, truly and clearly, “us.” For example, the worst forms of racist speech are now far beyond the pale—to the extent that the despicable N-word can no longer Read More ›
George Orwell once quipped that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” Orwell, who penned the classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was undoubtedly aware that the best stories — especially science fiction — are those that contain just enough truth to have the air of plausibility. If one were to believe the news media, 2010 was a banner Read More ›
The Obama Administration Department of Interior has just been held in contempt for refusing to abide by a federal judge’s ruling. “Not content with that flouting of a court order, the Obama Administration is now ignoring an even more important ruling it doesn’t like,” says bioethicist Wesley J. Smith. “a federal judge throwing out the entire Patient Affordability Act as Read More ›
Hubris: No better word describes the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s plan to persuade Californians to borrow another $3 billion to keep it in business funding stem cell research. The CIRM was created in 2004 in the wake of President George W. Bush’s order restricting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Knowing that many Californians perceived themselves as “the Read More ›
Congress is considering a ban on “invasive research” on chimpanzees and a few other intelligent primates in a move that represents the first step toward a ban on all experiments using animals. According to Discovery Institute Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, this is just the tip of the iceberg as animal rights extremists look forward to the confirmation of law professor Read More ›
Scientists and political activists during the past century have drawn on Darwinian theory to promote one utopian crusade after another, including forced sterilization, scientific racism, euthanasia, and an ever-expanding government justified in the name of the “evolving Constitution.” The typical response of Darwinists to this record of coercive “Social Darwinism” is to deny that it has any genuine connection to Read More ›
This article, published by the Rhode Island Developmental Disabilities Council, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: “While personhood theory is not a unanimously held view among bioethicists, it is widely accepted, particularly among academics at the most elite institutions,” says Wesley J. Smith author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America. The rest of Read More ›
Discovery senior fellow Wesley J. Smith has returned to podcasting with What It Means to Be Human, a podcast about the many policies and proposals in bioethics, bioscience, and animal liberation that threaten the idea of human exceptionalism and undermine universal human rights: On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow in Human Read More ›
For the past two decades, euthanasia/assisted-suicide ideologues have worked overtime to conflate palliative carethe medical alleviation of pain and other distressing symptoms of serious illnesswith intentionally ending the life of the patient. The movements first target was the hospice, a specialized form of care for the dying created forty years ago in the United Kingdom by the late, great medical Read More ›