Obama’s “uniter” persona also assured Americans that he’d continue to support “promising research of all kinds, including groundbreaking research to convert ordinary human cells into ones that resemble embryonic stem cells.” This research has proven extraordinarily promising, especially after a dramatic breakthrough in 2007: Scientists in Japan and the US discovered they could engineer human skin cells to mimic embryonic stem cell. This could allow the scientific community to probe the benefits of these cells without actually destroying human embryos. To some, this development rendered the controversy moot, and vindicated President Bush’s moral and ethical caution. At the very least, it was an enormous scientific step forward that all observers could unabashedly celebrate.

For this reason, the previous administration—you know, the divisive ideologues who hated science—issued executive order 13435 in 2007 that directed federal funding toward alternative, non-controversial human pluripotent stem cell research. Although some critics argued this action didn’t go far enough, and that further embryonic stem cell research should also be funded, no one could legitimately oppose the funding of this universally welcomed breakthrough.

That brings us to the nasty, gratuitous, and nearly entirely unpublicized action President Obama took amidst the hoopla of overturning Bush’s policies. Right after he told the country he supported for alternative, non-destructive stem cell research, Obama signed the actual order. Buried at the very bottom of the document was this line: “Executive Order 13435…is revoked.” That’s right, he abolished President Bush’s funding for the type of stem cell research upon which everyone could agree. Just like that.

In my August 2008 column, I speculated as to why then-State Senator Obama had repeatedly opposed no-brainer, pro-life legislation that passed the US Congress without a single dissenting vote. I wrote, “[One] possibility is that Obama’s a hyper-partisan ideologue. The driving forces behind the Born Alive Infant Protection Act were pro-life groups that generally support Republicans. Perhaps Obama’s fierce partisanship and leftist ideology were simply too strong for him to stomach handing any conservative group a political victory. If this is the case, his vote was petty and appallingly callous. It also would entirely undermine the overarching message of his famous 2004 DNC speech in which he decried blue vs. red state polarization and embraced America in with a big, royal purple hug of bipartisanship and inclusion.”

In the face of yet another grotesque Obama policy decision on the issue of life, famed bioethicist Wesley J. Smith pondered a similar question. On his blog, he wondered why on earth Obama would take the totally unnecessary action he did in undoing excutive order 13435. Smith’s conclusion: “I can think of only two reasons for this action…First, vindictiveness against all things "Bush" or policies considered by the Left to be "pro life;" and second, a desire to get the public to see unborn human life as a mere corn crop ripe for the harvest. So much for taking the politics out of science.”

This decision by the president is hypocritical in the extreme, and demonstrates that Obama’s language about respect, inclusion, and unity are, in fact, just words. Regardless of one’s feelings on the separate issue of embryonic stem cell research, this narrow element of his executive order is an outrage, and “thoughtful and decent” people of all ideological backgrounds should urge the White House to follow the president’s own rhetoric by rejecting the imposition of leftist ideology at the expense good science.