The Weekly Standard’s J. Bottom points out how Rick Weiss of The Washington Post seeks to connect religious conservatives to the Taliban. From Thursday’s Washington Post:

‘In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the nation’s moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to free a faraway nation from the grip of religious conservatives who were denounced for imposing their moral code on others.’ [emphasis mine]

Odd juxtaposition and repetition, no? I happen not to agree with cloning alarmists (and I consider “alarmist” a fair characterization of those who sound alarms) because history has taught us that science will move inexorably ahead (for the greater good, mostly) with or without the recommendation of one particular “moral” mandate; and so I believe religious conservatives to be wrong in this instance. As a result, I view their attempts to quash cloning research as ill-advised and short-sighted — and I often say so.

None of which means that I expect they’ll begin dropping walls on homosexuals or clubbing women with sticks for making unsanctioned noises. Such a conflation of wildly different religious conservativisms is deliberately hyperbolic and meanspirited. And Weiss knows it.

Sadly, that kind of rhetorical excess is hardly unusual — even as the U.S. is fighting real “religious” authoritarianism in a faraway land…

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