Reasoning like this in Washington shut the door on a federal cloning ban and opened the door to California's initiative drive.
In April, organizers submitted 1 million signatures to the California secretary of state seeking to qualify a proposed state constitutional amendment for the November ballot. The signatures are still being verified, but the initiative needs only 598,000 to be certified.
The proposal is entitled the "California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative," but it ought to be called "Loan-to-Clone-to-Kill." If passed, it would enshrine clone-to-kill research as a "right" in California and direct the state government to sell $3 billion in bonds over the next 10 years to provide grants to universities, think tanks and "commercial entities" to finance "stem cell" research.
The dark heart of the initiative is buried in obscure language that would be added to California's constitution: "There is hereby established a right to conduct stem cell research which includes research involving adult stem cells, cord blood stem cells, pluripotent stem cells and/or progenitor cells.... Pluripotent stem cells may be derived from somatic cell nuclear transfer..."
"Somatic cell nuclear transfer" is the pseudo-scientific term for cloning a human embryo from an adult human being.
Loan-to-Clone-to-Kill has a chance of winning because there is big money behind it. "In all," the Associated Press reported last month, "Silicon Valley venture capitalists and their families have contributed more than $1.8 million to a campaign that has raised about $5.3 million since late last year and is attempting to raise $20 million by the November election."
But if President Bush puts his own moral and political muscle into the campaign against this initiative, it can be defeated while clarifying the real principles at stake in a great and unavoidable national debate.
Backers of Loan-to-Clone-to-Kill will spend millions painting it as a charitable effort to find cures for horrible illnesses. But it is really all about coercion. It is about using the power of the state to deprive people of their lives and their property. Under this initiative, every human being created by cloning will be treated as a piece of property and then exterminated. Every taxpayer will be made to pay for that extermination, even those who recognize it for the abomination that it is.
As President Bush eloquently argued two years ago, human cloning research is really about exploiting and extinguishing human lives. California's Loan-to-Clone-to-Kill initiative gives him an opportunity to drive that argument home during his re-election campaign while winning the mandate he needs to completely ban cloning in the United States of America.