James Dobson, director of Focus on the Family, belongs to another category altogether. He compared embryonic stem cell research to Nazi death-camp experiments: "Ultimately, one life will be sacrificed to benefit another. That's evil." It's fair enough to think federal funding of such research is wrong; millions of Americans do. But the motives behind the research are not evil. Josef Mengele was evil. James Dobson is a decent and thoughtful man, but his exaggerated comparison is neither decent nor thoughtful, and merely demonstrates how difficult it is to argue hot-button issues in a reasonable and thoughtful way.
Stem cell research can and I think should be debated on moral terms, as a slippery slope for society. The issue is not whether stem cell research should be done but whether the government should fund it. Researchers who work with private money to seek cures for disease are neither immoral nor monsters.
Hitler and the Third Reich have become the standard for measuring evil, but we easily and often turn them into abstract symbols lacking neither nuance nor moral subtlety. The president has said he would veto any legislation that provides federal funding for stem cell research, and this deserves full debate. Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Bill Frist of Tennessee, both conservatives (and religious, too), are outspoken in support of federal funding. Surely Mr. Dobson does not mean to suggest that these two friends stand in the aura of the Nazis.
Recent portraits of Hitler, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele have focused on them as human beings who lived ordinary lives before the Third Reich, fleshing out their biographies as men rather than abstract images of evil. How they became human monsters requires specific attention to detail, not distorting generalizations. When Robert Jay Lifton was researching his book "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide," an Auschwitz survivor asked him: "Were they beasts when they did what they did? Or were they human beings?" Replied Mr. Lifton: "They were and are men, which is my justification for studying them, and their behavior."
Because we're human we have the capacity to make moral choices in heart and brain, tempering emotion with reason. Public issues require light not heat, and arguments must be grounded in discriminations made in good conscience. The devil, after all, is still at home in the details.