226 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
(2) The decision was wrong because the President allowed his 
personal moral views to govern federal policy. Or, along the same 
lines, the congressional ban is wrong because it represents the 
imposition of moral views — religiously based moral views at that — ^to 
frustrate sound and beneficial public policy. 
(3) The decision is morally incoherent, for if an act is so immoral 
as to deserve the governmental disapproval implicit in withholding 
funding, it should be accompanied by efforts to prohibit the activity 
altogether. 
Whatever the merits of the current law, or the President’s 2001 
stem cell decision, these objections, once closely examined, cannot 
pass muster. The first confuses a limitation on funding v\nth the 
imposition of a ban or prohibition. The second wrongly supposes that 
legislating morals through federal budget decisions is always or 
generally wrong. And the third incorrectly assumes that government 
has an obligation to bring an end to all conduct it believes immoral. 
Explaining these errors requires an exploration of the meaning of 
all government funding decisions. Such an exploration can not 
decide the difficult question of the merits of the President’s stem cell 
policy. It can, however, put to rest the objections built around the 
claim that the policy somehow violates the letter or the spirit of 
sound constitutional government. 
n. FEDERAL FUNDING 
A. Basic Considerations 
'The common objections to the President’s policy fail to come to 
grips with what government funding in a liberal democracy really 
means. Several fundamental features of our constitutional system 
need to be emphasized. 
First, no one and no activity has a constitutional right to federal 
funding. There is no governmental obligation to fund most activities, 
not even the most worthy, save for such matters as the Constitution 
explicitly proclaims to be the responsibility of government, such as 
national defense, the maintenance of federal courts, the holding of 
elections, and so on. And even concerning these constitutional 
essentials, it is an open question, to be resolved by our elected 
representatives, of how government will choose to allocate taxpayer 
dollars. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERISON 
