Iowa Secretary of State and Democrat Party Gubernatorial candidate Chet Culver has denounced Congressman and Iowa GOP Gubernatorial candidate Jim Nussle's vote against HR 810, the embryonic stem cell research funding bill, and Nussle's subsequent vote not to override President Bush's veto of the bill.
Culver's denouncement included an announcement that, if he is elected Governor, he will fund a "$10 million investment in the creation of a Center for Regenerative Medicine in Iowa City, which will conduct cutting edge research and attract the top scientists in the field to Iowa." Who is he kidding? California is in the process of spending $3 billion killing human embryos in order to harvest their stem cells. Connecticut is spending $100 million. The Harvard University Stem Cell Institute is spending milliions of its own, and has now gone headlong into human cloning.
What does Culver think $10M is going to do to bring the top scientists here?
Culver is deceptive in his release. First, he says that Nussle is "standing directly in the way of this life-saving research that will one day help our family members and friends, and win the battle against deadly diseases." (Emphasis added.) In fact, Culver has no idea whether embryonic stem cells will produce viable treatments for anything, because no one knows. Unlike treatments derived from adult stem cells, presently there are no treatments derived from embryonic stem cells. There aren't even any treatments in clinical human trials.
Culver also says that Iowa has a "ban on important stem cell research," something he will lead to overturn. There is no such ban, and Culver surely knows it. What he is talking about is Iowa's ban on human cloning, enacted in 2002 (Iowa Code chapter 707B). But Culver lacks the backbone to stand up and say he wants Iowa's ban on human cloning revoked, so that Iowans could create and destroy human embryos for research purposes.
This is not the first time Culver has been deceptive on this issue. In a Culver advertisement during the Democratic primary campaign, a narrator stated about candidate Mike Blouin: "Blouin supports the Bush ban on stem-cell research." No such ban exists.
Elsewhere among Iowa Democrats, Senator Tom Harkin, in not one of the finer moments of rhetoric in U.S. political history, said, "Who set up the President of the United States -- this President -- as our moral pope? The president of the United States is not our moral Ayatollah. He may wish to be, but he's not." Harkin's preference is to abandon morality if it gets in the way of the wishes of scientists. As to who "set up the President" to be able to veto this legislation, or any legislation, for any reason he chooses, it was we the people who gave him the authority to exercise the power granted to him under Art. I, sec. 7 of the U.S. Constitution.
Meanwhile, William H. Buckley has a typically insightful column on the subject. He writes:
When I was very young I would play with my younger sister weighty moral games. I remember one of them which said ... Suppose by pushing down just here (I touched my thumb down on a spot of grass) we could kill one Chinese at the other end of the world and we'd get $1 million. Should we do it?
No, Tish said. That would be murder.
I tried to prolong the grand inquiry by pointing out that there were different kinds of murder, some more sinful than others. "It wouldn't be as though we pulled out a pistol and shot the man."
She lingered for a moment, but came back. No, she said.
. . . .
Critics of the president, in high fury, say numerous things, among them that embryos by the millions are fated to die as a matter of course, so that to single out those that die, so to speak, under the researcher's knife is arbitrary and morally meaningless.Well, so the argument goes, but we can take whatever satisfaction we wish from the knowledge that there is one Chinese there, whose life has been saved.
