This posting is plea to the progressive faith community. Please make your voice heard in support of HR 810, the bill that would expand funding on additional embryonic stem cell lines. Not only do we who suffer need more voices in support, we need religious voices.

As today’s Washington Post put it:

The existing limit on research -- allowing researchers to use only existing lines of stem cells -- has proved unduly restrictive. When Mr. Bush announced that he would permit the use of existing stem cell lines almost five years ago, that compromise made sense. But instead of the 78 lines originally foreseen by the administration, only 22 are available, and some of those are deteriorating or contaminated.

Research into alternative sources of stem cells, while promising and important, remains too far from fruition to justify the continuing ban on using discarded embryos. A vote for a companion stem cell measure that would encourage such research is fine -- the bill would simply reaffirm what is already taking place -- but it cannot substitute for loosening the rules on embryonic research. As Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said last year when he announced his change of heart on the issue, "the limitation put into place in 2001 will, over time, slow our ability to bring potential new treatments for certain diseases."

Now, there are those who oppose this research on religious grounds, but when they make their arguments they do so often using incorrect premises. For example they will say that adult stem research renders embryonic stem cell research unnecessary. They will incorrectly claim that adult stem cells are being used for treatments of sixty to seventy different medical conditions: this too is a gross exaggeration. It is an assault of near mendacity being led by US Senator Same Brownback (R-Kansas; Brownback, for the record is an Opus Dei cooperator the reactionary sect within my church leading the war against this research within the Catholic Church).

On July 13, 2006 the well respected magazine Science published a letter by researchers Shane Smith, William Neaves and Steven Teitelbaum effectively refuting Brownback’s claims:

Prentice not only misrepresents existing adult stem cell treatments but also frequently distorts the nature and content of the references he cites…By promoting the falsehood that adult stem cell treatments are already in general use for 65 diseases and injuries, Prentice and those who repeat his claims mislead laypeople and cruelly deceive patients.

The truth is we need both embryonic and adult stem cell research fully funded and fully regulated. At this early stage of stem cell research it foolish to put all our eggs in one basket. Furthermore, any sin regarding this research lies not in harvesting stem cells from surplus embryos, but with those who use their own subjective version of the truth to deny hope to the dying and the disabled.

Religious absolutists such as Sam Brownback, Archbishop Burke of St. Louis and Archbishop Myers of Newark are among the biggest dissemblers on information regarding this research. Now, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the highly placed Opus Dei member who now heads the Pontifical Council for the Family now threatens excommunication to researchers and politicians who support this potentially life-saving research.

Well as a Catholic who believes in the true non-infallible teachings such as the resurrection, I have a challenge for dogmatic bullies such as Cardinal Trujillo.

If you are going to excommunicate those who are trying to save my life, the politicians of both major political parties who seek to enable this noble research, then don’t start with them. Instead put your money where your mouth is and start with me, a patient advocate whose body is rotting in a wheelchair from muscular dystrophy, whose wife wakes up four times a night to roll me over and who is burnt out from being a loving caregiver for the last ten years.

Start with me Cardinal Trujillo, someone who needs help just to take a shower, deficate or comb my hair without someone to assist me. Excommunicate me, a man who can’t even lift his arms to hugs his wife and children, but who believes with his heart that a loving Jesus would not object to this example of what His Judaism calls Pecukah nefesh or what St. Thomas Aquinas called Epikiea. And that is something that a Jesus who healed the sick and raised the dead fully understood. Start with me Cardinal, if you are heartless enough to excommunicate the dying and disabled. It is advocates like me who demand this research. It is people like me who are the true agitators.

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Dogmatic men such as David Prentice, Sam Brownback and Cardinal Trujillo seem to forget that the essence of faithful action is not always black and white, but comes in varied shades of gray. Earlier I mentioned the similar concepts of Pecukah nefesh and Epikiea. Great thinkers of the Judeo-Christian tradition have always understood that sometimes one needs to break the letter of the Law to achieve the spirit of the Law.

You see in the music of faith, saving a life in being is often the holiest of songs. But if the written rules of faith are the keys to such music, then as with music we sometime must break the letter of the Law to achieve the spirit of God’s Law. Think of the song "Maria" written by Leonard Bernstein for his masterpiece West Side Story. The song, written in the key of C (no sharps or flats) famously uses the tritone, i.e. key of C with a prominent F#. The three note melody of the word "Maria" is C F# G. The tritone, or "flat-five" in jazzspeak, is generally considered the most dissonant interval, but without that deissonance from the rules for the key of C, the song Maria would lose its essence.

Well, to put it in jazzspeak, stem cell research is the prominent F# in curing disease. It is the change we need to effect to do the greatest good; saving lives in being.

In closing, six years of delay is too much. I now ask my friends of faith, as well as my secular friends to sing the song of healing. This is not a plea for eternal life, but to lead a quality life on Earth with the short time we are given.

Over the course of the next two days, call your US Senators and tell them that you are a person of faith and that you want HR 810 passed. Please let them here our song of hope and faith.