Deafening Silence

Y'ever heard the old saying, "What you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying"? As Double-H brings to our attention today, noted one-time/some-time/probably phony all along right-wing/Kerry-supporting/oh-by-the-way-did-you-know-he's-a-pole-smoker Andrew Sullivan makes abundantly apparent once again what some of us have known for years: most (not all) rump rangers are far more virulently hateful of and bigoted against evangelical Christians than the latter could ever dream of being "homophobic."

Almost as hateful as....Islamists, come to think of it.

Meanwhile, what is getting predictably no coverage (or almost none) is the trend toward biological researchers abandoning the chimera of embryonic stem cell research in favor of their adult counterparts, which actually have medical promise and don't destroy human life:

[A]rdent advocates of cloning do not exhaust the field of embryonic stem cell researchers. After a recent meeting of the world’s top stem-cell researchers sponsored by the Colorado-based Keystone Symposia last month, it became apparent that many advocates of such research do not share this newfound optimism for cloning as a source of patient-specific stem cells. According to one of the participants, Dr. Markus Grompe, who is a professor of molecular and medical genetics at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, many researchers are now pouring their efforts into alternatives to cloning.

Grompe is a leading researcher in adult-stem-cell research and a board member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, and he explained to me recently that many of the world’s top names in embryonic-stem-cell research are now considering alternative approaches. He described how, in presentation after presentation at the exclusive meeting, researchers revealed that they are now investing their precious research dollars in ethically uncontroversial alternatives to cloning—uncontroversial because they would not involve the destruction of human embryos. “The intense interest in this area,” he explained, “is driven by the realization that it will be technically extremely difficult and impractical to generate tissue-matched pluripotent stem cells by cloning.” The meeting was animated by a real sense of imminent advances in these alternatives which the researchers believe will be just as useful to science and medicine as embryonic stem cells, and potentially more cost effective.

So the choice is between doing it better, cheaper, and ethically, versus failing at greater financial and grievous moral cost. That isn't a choice at all, and reduces cloning to the same Mengelean level of dishonest heinousity as the abortion and euthanasia wings of the modern death cult, which have one common thread running throughout: the need to kill the innocent and defenseless on a massive scale cloaked in a miasma of moral superiority.

There's an obvious historical example I could cite, but Godwin's Law forbids.