I guess I just must be the worst kind of human being.
Although I am not sure what kind of human being I am, I am fairly confident that I am one of the worst.
Maybe I should ask Dubya if he could tell me what kind of human being I am, because Dubya, along with the Jesus Freaks that follow him, should be able to tell me.
If anyone can, they can.
The reason I say that is because according to them, a human being can be anything from a full grown man or woman strapped into an electric chair, doused with water, a blind fold over their eyes with a leather strap in their mouth, to a group of cells inside of a Petri dish to everything in between.
Today Dubya publicly condemned stem cell research advances recently made in South Korea, saying that he is worried about “living in a world in which human cloning was condoned”.
For those of you completely out of the loop, the South Koreans have developed a way to take DNA from a human being, inject it in a specially created human egg that then develops into an embryo that is genetically identical to the patient. They then remove the stem cells from the three-day old embryo and in the process the embryo is destroyed.
The upside of this is that from those stem cells could be the cure to a myriad of diseases, conditions, and disabilities from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
The downside is…well nothing.
For those of you who don’t know what an Embryo is, an Embryo is an organism in its early stages of development, particularly before it has reached a distinctively recognizable form.
What I find interesting is that conservatives say that if blinding a few thousand rabbits will help someone build a creamier, shiner shampoo, then go right ahead blind away, but if destroying a three-day old embryo will help repair someone’s body after a stroke, repair nerves in someone’s damaged spine, cure Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease or even help the blind to see, then that is too high of a price to pay.
What price?
If all we are talking about is destroying a three-day old embryo that was made from my own skin cells, I don’t even consider that a price to pay.
That is free.
Save the rabbits. We are blinding them to make a better toothpaste. You can scrape the skin off my knees until they bleed if that is what it takes to not end up like my grandfather, bedridden, curled up in the fetal position, trapped inside of this trembling shell that we call a body from 20 years of battling Parkinson’s disease.
Like I said, technically I guess if someone wanted to take an embryo and put it in a fertile woman, a human being that would be genetically identical to the host that provided the cells would be born if carried to term.
So?
Like we haven’t been doing that shit already.
What I would really like to ask him is what is the big deal about cloning people anyway?
We don’t freak out when someone has identical twins do we? They have identical DNA.
I think deep down this is about a Jesus Freak being threatened by the fact that science has taken away yet another thing that he said that only God was capable of doing.
Listen people, this isn’t about cloning human beings; this is about removing the stem cells to heal the sick, removing the stem cells destroys the embryo.
So is that embryo a human being too? Yeah, I am talking about that microscopic stuff that is floating around in the Petri dish.
See, I was under the impression from the pro-life movement that a fetus was a human being because it had to have eyes and ears and teeth and could kick its feet.
Now a human being is also a cell floating around in a shallow circular dish with a loose-fitting cover, used to culture bacteria or other microorganisms?
I thought a human being needed fingerprints, a head, eyes, something.
Give me something.
What I want is a definition of a human being.
But if you don't have that I will be happy with a little common sense.
I would also like to find a pastor somewhere that is brave enough to stand up and tell me that stuff in the Petri dish has a soul?
That is it an innocent life?
It isn’t even sentient? How could it be? It doesn’t even have a brain.
My sperm are smarter than that embryo is after 3 days.
It isn’t sentient, it isn’t aware of itself. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an it.
At that stage it isn’t anymore human than it is goat, gorilla, or elephant. It is a collection of divided cells.
And I knew Dubya would come out and condemn this, but I bet Dubya can’t even define human being.
My guess would be that just like porn, “he can’t define it, he just knows it when he sees it.”
I can’t wait until the Heritage Foundation or some other conservative think tank starts to call for women who have miscarriages days after conception to be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Involuntary manslaughter usually refers to an unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence and since conservatives love playing on slippery slopes, let’s go there with them.
Let’s assume that eventually they are going to argue that once you have sex, you should stop drinking, smoking, exercising, eating fast foods, holding your breath or whatever it was that you did that might make you pass that “human being” into the toilet.
That would be criminally negligent. That three-day old cell in your body that is the size of the head of a pin is a human being you know?
The beautiful thing about all of this is that as soon as a conservative comes down with a disease that can be cured with stem cell research, their hypocrisy blossoms like a full grown butterfly, suddenly they see the error of their ways and they’re shamelessly all for it.
You don’t need to look any further than Nancy Reagan. When Ronnie was alive and had all of his senses, he would have been against Stem Cell research too. Then as soon as he started to forget how to wipe his own ass, he would’ve been all about it like Nancy is now.
Suddenly there is no controversy over whether or not what is in that Petri dish is a human life or not because once faced with the reality of disease the only life a conservative is thinking about at that point is their own.
And like nearly everything else, 50 years from now, once they catch up to the rest of us and stem cells are just an everyday part of modern medicine, they will be accepting the treatments without guilt and these questions around the morality of all of this would be just another part of the history books that they will be campaigning the school boards to get removed.