"Are you speaking from within a rationalist perspective, or are you defaulting to speaking from within a populist framework?"
I made what I think are some true factual claims about the world. What do you mean and why is it relevant?
Your comment assumes that policies should be set by people with values representative of the population.
Representative democracy is not designed to follow values representative of the population. That would be direct democracy. Representative democracy is supposed to be a way of finding representatives who are wiser than the general population. So if we speak from just the slightly-more-elitist framework of representative democracy that the US founders intended, this assumption is wrong.
From Michael Eisen's blog:
Yuval Levin, former Executive Director of the President's Council on Bioethics, has an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post arguing that Obama's new stem cell policy is dangerous. Levin does not argue that stem cell research is bad. Rather he is upset that Obama did not dictate which uses of stem cells are appropriate, but rather asked the National Institutes of Health to draft a policy on which uses of stem cells are appropriate:
Lost in this superficially unobjectionable - if banal - assertion of the complexity of ethical issues involving science is Levin's (and many other bioethicists) credo: that the moral complexity of scientific issues means that scientists should not make decisions about them.