Playing God in Washington

Three years after posturing over Terri Schiavo's right to be kept alive after brain death, members of Congress are faced with real end-of-life questions in proposed legislation to force the FDA to speed up its drug-approval process and give terminally ill patients access to investigative drugs.

Last week they had to look into eyes of a 12-year-old Maryland girl with inoperable liver cancer as her mother pleaded on her behalf.

"Finding help for a sick child should be easy, but it isn't," said Anna Tomalis' mother, who told them her daughter had been turned away from drug studies because she is not healthy enough. "For Anna, time is running out. She doesn't have years to wait for these drugs to become available."

The new bill is sponsored by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback and California Democratic Rep. Diane Watson. "What we need is a system that looks at the patient and their life-or-death situation, not at a bureaucracy and its needs," says Brownback, a melanoma survivor. "This is deadly neglect, and it can't continue."

From the other end of the political spectrum, Rep. Watson cites the grass-roots movement that demanded experimental drugs for terminally ill AIDS patients, arguing that "anyone whose diagnosis amounted to being handed a death sentence" should "have an opportunity to try these drugs."

In January, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that the terminally ill have no constitutional right to be treated with experimental drugs.

According to Brownback, only 650 people out of 4.8 million who died of cancer were given such treatment over a recent eight-year period.

An oncologist and researcher who testified about balancing public safety with risks notes, "It takes 10 years and $50 million to develop a new drug--that's insane...Cancer patients have a sense of hopelessness. That's something human beings cannot tolerate. Hopelessness is the worst disease in the world. These patients need some hope."

The FDA will have to make a strong case for withholding it.

"Crazy Doctors and Crazy Christians"

As he often does, Nicholas Kristof makes a point for American decency in his New York Times column today:

"Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals...

"Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

"Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives."

Of all the damage George W. Bush has done to our national character, least visible is how his faith-based meanness has obscured traditional admiration by Americans of all religions, or none, of figures like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, whose beliefs lead to humility, self-sacrifice and good works rather than contempt for those who fail to share their self-serving political certainties.

“Cheap grace,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister hanged by Hitler for denouncing the comfort his Church was conferring on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of the Nazis, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession.”

That the cheap grace of Bush, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is being superceded by the working faith of a new generation of evangelicals is heartening.

"In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves," Kristof writes, "you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians."

Their devotion is good news in every sense.

There Goes the Log Cabin Vote

"Mike Huckabee," the AP reports, "once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could 'pose a dangerous public health risk.'"

If the preacher is planning to go Reaganesque in his surge toward the GOP nomination, this news will not sit well with the 47 chapters of the Long Cabin Republicans, who got their start in California in 1977 when the Great Communicator opposed an anti-gay ballot initiative against teachers and helped defeat it.

Reagan wrote a letter outlining his views, in which he said, "Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this."

In contrast, answering a questionnaire when he was running for the Senate in 1992, Huckabee wrote: "It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents."

The former Arkansas governor won't be making any new friends in Hollywood either when they learn he opposed federal funding for AIDS research and suggest that celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna who support it do so "out of their own personal treasuries."

But as a candidate this year, Huckabee did a little flip-flopping on his web site: "My administration will be the first to have an overarching strategy for dealing with HIV and AIDS here in the United States, with a partnership between the public and private sectors that will provide necessary financing and a realistic path toward our goals."

Huckabee and Mitt Romney might have bumped into each other racing toward new positions on gays from opposite directions. But he could make a new friend in Lou Dobbs, who wants to treat illegal immigrants as lepers, too.