Michael Kinsley, Sith Lord of the Cult of Death

It must take a unique combination of arrogance and ignorance to be Michael Kinsley:

For columnist Michael Kinsley human embryos are at once valuable and valueless. Their parts contain a possible cure for his Parkinson's disease, yet they are "biologically more primitive than a mosquito," he wrote last Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. Kinsley is very enamored with this mosquito-embryo comparison. He's used it before in previous columns to drive home the point that disposing of human embryos should generate even less thought than swatting a mosquito. For good measure in this column Kinsley also calls human embryos "tiny clumps of cells" lest we fail to grasp how silly it is to consider them worthy of respect.

Historians of ideas should clip Kinsley's columns on this subject as a straightforward example of the American elite's rancid and heedless moral philosophy circa 2000. They reveal that as the age of cloning advances, the elite, demanding longevity at all moral costs, consoles itself with the thought that the class of lab humans they hope to form are "more primitive" than insects. The human embryo is the one endangered species they won't protect and will use as their utopian science's slave.

What inspired Kinsley's most recent column was the news that South Korean scientists had cloned human embryos as spare parts for science. Kinsley regards this as a wonderful development. But he is upset with those like Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, who in the wake of the news were mulling "morality and all that." The usually skeptical Kinsley has boundless confidence in these South Korean scientists and rebuked ethicists like Kass for challenging these all-knowing men with time-wasting questions.

But if Kinsley won't question science, he will question God. "I have no trouble feeling that the government should value my life more than the lives of these clumps," he wrote. "God may disagree. But the government reports to me and to other adult Americans, not to God."

We should note, of course, that Michael Kinsley himself, the great opinion scribe and liberal stalwart, arose from such biologically-primitive clumps of cells as he would like to see destroyed in the quixotic hope of a cure for his affliction.

That might be a generous read on his position. After all, he had no trouble encouraging women to eradicate millions of these biologically-primitive clumps of cells prior to getting Parkinson's.

What amazes me is not that Kinsley and his ilk view human embryos as biologically-primitive clumps of cells, but that God does not view us in that way, even though we may deserve His disdain, as Kinsley and the other death merchants surely do.