08/10/09
Aristotle said, "One swallow does not a summer make...," however one pleasant surprise from The Obama Administration has been the appointment of Dr. Francis S. Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. It is very interesting that Collins was nominated July 8 and in less than a month confirmed by voice vote just before the Senate skedaddled for August recess. I myself was not aware that he had been named to head NIH until a set-up story about his confirmation came through my desk on August 4.
What's interesting is that there was no hoo-haw at all from lefties over the doctor's elevation. Logic and fairness are not pillars of the intellectual superiority claimed by liberals, but logically they should have been wailing like banshees over Francis S. Collins. Their pitbulls in the senate should have been holding up his nomination while SNL, Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow gave him The Sarah Palin Treatment. You see, Collins, the man Obama put in charge of the government's biomedical and health research, including research on AIDS, is a devout Christian. In liberal dogma a devout Christian is ipso facto, a superstitious troglodyte, a subhuman cretin from under the barrel. And not only is Collins a devout Christian, he is a product of home-schooling.
Of course, while the far left is getting impatient with Obama, he can still do no wrong. The target morons of the moment are those imbeciles who can't act without the direction of talk-show hosts and who dare to exercise their First Amendment rights at health-care town meetings. Also the guardians of "intelligence" and "reason" can't get around the fact that Collins is the ideal man for the job. Instead of making war on science and reason according to stereotype, he has been, like many another devout Christian in history, a principal figure in one of science's giant leaps.
Indeed Collins has led the opening of the new frontier of science in the Twenty-first Century, that of the human genome. As a young doctor he developed methods of identifying disease genes and as head of the Human Genome Project--succeeding James D. Watson of Watson & Crick--he oversaw the mapping of the three billion base pairs that make up human chromosomes.
Collins has conducted himself astutely as a religious man who is a scientist and public figure. What kind of "devout Christian" he is is not clear. He does not publicly proclaim membership in any Christian church and like the Christian thinker who influenced him, C.S. Lewis, he avoids discussing any denomination's distinctive doctrine. Although he does proclaim a belief in "a moral law"--a law beyond human control, a type of law that is anathema to the sexually liberated--he keeps his position on abortion and other life issues close to his chest. His very readable book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, defends the Theory of Evolution and is as much an argument against Intelligent Design and Creationism as it is an argument for the reasonableness of belief in God.
For his advocacy of evolution, he is in the doghouse with the Intelligent Design crowd; one can't plausibly say that his appointment is an Obama trick to attract evangelical Christians. Any tricks that Obama pulls only work on Democrats
There are lessons in Francis S. Collins' career journey, lessons for other believers who may find themselves on the road to high places in government. The comedians who provide the left with its intellectual basis and get mobs of idiots to jeer at Republican presidential and veep candidates even before they break from the gate are fundamentally rabble-rousers. In spite of their talk about "reason" and "sanity" neither rabble-rousing clowns nor the rabbles they rouse understand science, NIHs, genomes or the many other lower-profile and enduring offices and functions of the U.S. Government. Such things are way above their radar.
Copyright 2009 by Neal J. Conway