From a reader:

Jonah, I think there’s a case to be made that the right and left alike are anti-science when that science doesn’t agree with their ideologies, while conservatives and liberals alike are pro-science in that they’d rather deal with the facts than stack the deck. But I don’t think you’ve got the right cad by using stem-cell research as the sign of being anti-science. The anti-science brigade simply denies things known by science to be true. Most of that denial occurs because it means either dealing with facts that don’t agree with ideology or contravene financial interests. Examples range from the belief that the universe is 6000 years old to the notion that human activity has nothing to do with global warming. We could toss in the tobacco industry claims against the link between cigarettes and cancer, the coal industry’s campaign that denied burning coal was the cause of acid rain, and others. No conservative says that stem-cell research isn’t promising, many would love to see it go forward so long as it doesn’t require the destruction of human blastocycts/embryos. There’s no denial of science here, but there is a spirited debate about the value of human life and when and how we as a society and species assert that value.