During post-election analysis, Republican luminaries stumbled badly in discussing Christine O’Donnell on the night of the Delaware senatorial primary.
But Delaware Republicans had just voted. They had given their support—rather convincingly—to the clearly more conservative O’Donnell in a hotly contested primary election. Where was the unity that night?
Her opponent, Mike Castle, is surely a prominent Delaware Republican. A veteran of the Governor’s Mansion and the holder of the state’s only seat in Congress, Castle should have won in a walk. But restive conservatives rebelled.
Pro-lifer O’Donnell stressed her economic differences with liberal Republican Castle. But it should not go without mention that Castle was the co-author of the Castle-DeGette bill. Under this measure, Americans would be taxed to create embryonic human beings. Taxpayers would then have to fund experiments upon those embryonic human beings, including cloning humans. Finally, the taxpayers would have to pay for the killing of these cloned humans and other embryonic human lives.
This is a nightmare scenario for pro-life Americans. Delaware is famous for its giant chemical company corporate headquarters. Do we really want to see one of the most important industries in the world given over to the creation of human beings and their destruction? Do we want to see human lives treated as no more than another commercial commodity?
Congressman Castle sincerely believes that cloning humans holds real promise for curing a host of human ills. For this promise, he is willing to cast aside moral and ethical constraints. Even Bill Clinton’s bioethical panelists recoiled at the idea of cloning human beings to kill them.
Consider how illogical Mr. Castle’s position is. If stem cells scavenged from embryonic human beings or from cloned humans really did promise cure-alls, wouldn’t those same Delaware corporations be elbowing each other in a profit-seeking race to become the discoverer, patent holder, and marketer of the golden pill?
The fact is that stem cells scavenged from embryonic humans have not yielded a single viable treatment or cure. This, despite the fact that there has never been a legal ban on killing these human beings for their stem cells.
All that President Bush said on August 9, 2001, was that the federal government would not pay for killing these embryonic humans. Bush in no way limited private corporations from killing.
The most promising treatments have come from ethical research using adult stem cells. Many people are confused by terminology here. Adult stem cells don’t have to come from adult people. They can be found even in umbilical cords of newborn children. Even the mothers’ placentas are rich sources of adult stem cells. We see daily breakthroughs coming from adult stem cell research. Many of the headline grabbers speak of stem cells being used for this or that promising treatment—even as they fail to note that the stem cells used were adult.
The Republican Party has billed itself as the pro-life alternative to a militantly pro-abortion Democratic Party since 1976. Since 1980, every Republican Platform has affirmed that “the unborn child has a right to life that cannot be infringed.” The last two Republican platforms, 2004 and 2008, have explicitly condemned cloning-to-kill, as envisioned by Castle-DeGette.
