PR.com (Allison Kugel): How did Ronald Reagan, who is a conservative icon, produce such a liberal son?

Ron Reagan: I’m not really sure. I imagine he produced me in the usual fashion (laughs).
But my folks always taught us to follow our own minds and our own conscience, and that’s what I’ve done. That’s what he did in his life. I just followed that example. I’ve followed my own mind and that’s where it led.

PR.com: Did you and your father check your opposing political beliefs at the door when you were together as a family, or did you have, let’s say, healthy debates about certain issues?

Ron Reagan: Oh, we’d argue about stuff all the time. We’d sit at the dinner table, as I got a little older of course, and argue environmental issues or things like that. You might expect that we’d be on the opposite side of issues. It was spirited, but it was always good natured. We didn’t have any terrible fallings out over these kinds of things.

PR.com: I know that both you and your mother are huge supporters of embryonic stem cell research. The fact that President Obama recently lifted the ban put in place by George W. Bush on funding for embryonic stem cell research is a huge stride. But had your mother not witnessed your father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, do you think she would still have been for embryonic stem cell research?

Ron Reagan: I think there was a big and deliberate misunderstanding fostered by people who were opponents of embryonic stem cell research that the only reason my mother, and perhaps myself and my sister as well, became interested in this is because my father had Alzheimer’s disease. None of us ever imagined for a second that anything having to do with embryonic stem cell research was going to be able to help my father. That was not why we became interested in the issue. We were interested in it because it seemed like the greater good would be served by pursuing this with research. That’s why we supported it. I have to admit that I was offended to a great extent by the Bush administration’s ignoring and distorting of science, in general. Their arguments against embryonic stem cell research are an example of this: the politicization of science and the distortion of it for their own political ends. I don’t know what President Bush’s personal feelings about stem cell research were. I take it at face value that he had moral qualms about this. I’m pretty sure though, from what I’ve heard from people who have spoken with him, that Karl Rove’s position on this, and he was the one calling the shots I think, Karl Rove’s position on stem cell research was solely driven by politics and political calculation. When you’re depriving people, potentially, of life saving or life improving cures or treatments purely for political reasons, I find that to be really shameful.

PR.com: I feel as though one of the reasons the Republican Party is in the state that it’s currently in is that they began using Christianity and Jesus as a political weapon, and now they’re suffering the backlash for it.

Ron Reagan: Yes, well they embraced a particular brand of Christianity, which is fundamentalist Christianity with a literalist view of the bible. That biblical literalism only goes so far. If you begin to pin people down about Deuteronomy and things like that, and slaughtering your own child for the sin of apostasy, well all of a sudden it becomes very metaphorical, and they begin backing off of that literal interpretation. The bible has a lot more to say about being good to the poor and treating your neighbor as yourself then it does about abortion, or rights for gay people or anything like that. But those are the issues they tend to fixate on. The bible, of course, says absolutely nothing about embryonic stem cell research. In fact, in the Jewish bible a fetus isn’t regarded as a full fledged entity until the fortieth day, at the so called “quickening.” So in that sense, from the bible’s standpoint, it’s a very different picture.

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