Michael Kinsley misses the point in Ross’ argument on stem-cell policy:

Let’s start with (c). Although it’s rarely put this way, coercion—especially financial coercion—is at the heart of any political system, including democracy. Almost the whole point of politics is to decide what money is spent communally, and how. Obviously the system can’t work if everyone gets to withhold tax dollars from projects they disapprove of. I and many others, for example, would have preferred to not to have our tax dollars go to finance the Iraq war. I’m sure Ross Douthat would have had no problem seeing why that wouldn’t work.

Well, I assume that people who opposed the war, as I did, wouldn’t have wanted their tax dollars supporting an invasion that they opposed, which is why they opposed the invasion. This is not difficult to understand. Ross argued in part that pro-lifers don’t want to pay for ESCR, because they find it morally objectionable, which is why they don’t want there to be any federal funding of ESCR. Unlike the war, which would not be funded only if there was no war, ESCR could go on without needing public support.

This is one reason why some pro-lifers found the Bush administration’s position, in which it permitted some funding of existing lines (i.e., cells derived from already-destroyed embryos), to be unacceptable. For one thing, it was, in effect, taking advantage of previous wrongdoing. This is also why his later veto of a bill on this subject wasn’t quite the great pro-life stand that many of his supporters pretended that it was. Indeed, in response to criticism of that veto (which I believe was the first veto of Mr. Bush’s Presidency), the White House insisted on reminding everyone that Mr. Bush had been the first President to authorize federal funding of this research. Something this controversial ought to be limited to private funding, or at the very least the administration could have retained Bush-era rules limiting funding to research into existing lines, even though pro-lifers also find the latter objectionable.