Biotheics Council member James Q. Wilson leaps to Kass's defense:

Try to think of another presidential council that has ever reflected such a wide range of views and expressed them with such clarity. Typically, a presidential body gets its marching orders from the White House and is composed of people whom one can predict will respond to those expectations. By contrast, President George W. Bush appointed a council that he knew in advance was divided and he issued no marching orders.

It is especially unfair to say that Kass suffers from a conflict of interest. The charge seems to rest on a press account that Kass will work with a writer to publish some new arguments in a respectable journal. This criticism is akin to demanding that judges never give speeches or write articles because somehow their independence will be jeopardized. If one employed that argument when one was selecting a chairman, one would have to recruit a philosophical eunuch who had managed to keep all thoughts to himself. But who would hire such a cipher?

Wilson seems convinced that what he's saying is true. But what kind of marching orders would have to be given to a man as predisposed as Leon Kass to reach reach certain conclusions? The Bioethics council started out phony and has only gotten phonier with the passage of time.