Stemming The Tide Of Anti-Life Quackery

On Monday, NRO editors began their editorial on the Senate's impending vote on federal funding for embryonic stem cell harvesting thusly:

In the next few days, a majority of senators are likely to vote to get the federal government, for the first time, in the business of killing human embryos for research purposes. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill, and he has the votes in the House to sustain his veto. So the only effect of a “yes” vote will be for senators to put themselves on record in favor of this noxious idea.

Senators didn't listen, passing the noxious idea 63-37. But it was more complicated than that:

A second bill would fund research that seeks to develop ways of producing the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without killing human embryos. Such research would be in addition to ongoing, federally funded research on stem cells taken from adults’ tissues and from umbilical-cord blood. It would also come on top of private-sector research that is proceeding in all of these directions. A third bill would impose the first limits on such research by outlawing fetal farming.

These two alternatives also passed the Senate by unanimous voice vote. Which is kind of curious, or at the very least pandering, since the line of contention on the stem cell issue is the destruction of human life versus the eschewing of phantom "scientific benefits" of embryo harvesting. The two alternative bills avoided both, so why vote for the third?

Answer: because the American death cult's propaganda has succeeded stunningly in misinforming the public on the issue. And the reason for that is because the forces of truth, justice, "all that other stuff," as well as life and science, have been asleep at the lecturn AND the switch:

It is true that most polls show public support for embryonic-stem-cell research. But that support drops substantially when it is clear that the research would be taxpayer-funded and would kill human embryos. In 2005, CBS found that the public approved “of medical research using embryonic stem cells” by a 58%-31% margin. But when CBS asked whether the federal government should limit funding to existing stem-cell lines or increase the number, enough of the supporters defected to the conservative side to produce a 48%-37% plurality for the President’s policy.

That's the negative side. The positive side - i.e. the proven medical benefits of adult, placenta, and umbilical stem cells - is even more dramatic. And for some strange reason that makes the embryophobic profoundly unhappy:

[N]ow three ESC advocates have directly challenged Prentice’s list....The letter claims ASC “treatments fully tested in all required phases of clinical trials and approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration are available to treat only nine of the conditions” on his list.

Well! One answer to that is that it’s nine more than can be claimed for ESCs. Further, there are 1,175 clinical trials for ASCs, including those no longer recruiting patients, with zero for ESCs. But a better response is that the letter authors come from the Kenneth Lay School for honesty, as do the editors at Science.

Maybe the reason the death cult gets so peeved is because it is they that are the modern medical equivalent of the Flat Earth society:

The embryonic stem cell research community based most of its inflated claims on the work of South Korean scientist Huang Woo-suk, who claimed to have created the world's first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them, raising hopes of cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Huang was widely acclaimed as a world-class stem cell pioneer and treated as a hero until investigations disclosed that he had fabricated key data in two papers published in the U.S. journal [*AHEM*], Science. He has now admitted the fraud and has been indicted along with five of his associates.

That single word - "fraud" - sums up the entire embryonic stem cell crusade. It is unscientific, medically dubious, yet dripping with equal parts congenital dishonesty, pseudoscientific hauteur, and the usual lefty contempt for the sanctity of human life.

And, being driven from the "blue" end of the spectrum, 'tis less than surprising that, having painted themselves into a corner, one of the ESC bill's two House sponsors bricked them into the wall like Al Capone's vault for good measure:

The Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act was a great constructive opportunity for Congress. Early on Tuesday, a leading pro-life senator, Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum....rattled off his record of commitment to stem-cell-research advocacy, none of it destructive. He talked about his attempt at finding a “middle ground” by sponsoring a bill to fund adult-stem-cell and other non-embryo-destroying research....The bill, in both its House and its Senate version, was an embrace of research that is free of embryonic-stem-cell research’s unavoidable ethical baggage.

But on Tuesday afternoon, Delaware Republican Mike Castle, co-sponsor of a bill that would federally fund embryonic-stem-cell research for the first time, sent around an e-mail urging colleagues to vote against Santorum’s alternatives bill....Since they already knew the President would veto the Castle bill, and since embryonic-stem-cell research will always be a lightning rod for political and moral debate, the alternatives bill was a gift to any politician. Embryo-research stalwart Mike Castle and, say, embryo-protection stalwart (Dr.) Dave Weldon could have united behind it. Given Congress’s dismal approval ratings, it would have even been good politics....

So much for that. Under a rules suspension Tuesday night, the bill failed to get the two-thirds needed for passage, thanks to Castle’s eleventh-hour work. Even in the Senate, where the alternatives bill garnered unanimous support in the final roll call, Minority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t help but dismiss it as “meaningless.”

Let's tally this up. ESC proponents couldn't garner enough votes to override a veto of their anti-life medical quackery bill, so in retaliation they made sure that neither of the scientifically valid alternatives would pass either. And like clockwork, President Bush made good on his veto threat, and the House fell 51 votes short of an override.

There are, in my estimation, three possible conclusions to draw from this week's stem cell hoo-ha:

1) Embryophobes are not interested in compromise and refuse to recognize the moral and intellectual validity of their opponents;

2) Embryophobes use the false promise of medical advances from ESCs to hide their true ghoulish motivation of destroying human life;

3) Ergo, embryophobes are extremists who are themselves utterly ethically and intellectually bankrupt - or else they would not have fanatically opposed the two non-destructive stem cell alternative bills.

This should hand the stem cell issue to the Republicans, lock, stock, & barrel. Whether they'll take it is anybody's guess. But it wouldn't be the first time that GOPers looked the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.