Here is a video of the latest bit of fundie propoganda, airing in Missouri, where voters will soon have the opportunity to vote “yes” to allow the full range of stem cell research.
These anti-stem-cell actors and athletes should be made to walk through hospitals and hospices. They should be made to stop and talk with each child or adult patient dying of a presently incurable disease. They should be made to say something like this to each of these patients:
God would rather save a blastocyst than you. You, and all others with your disease, must die. I get to choose your destiny. I am pro-life. By depriving you of potential life-saving cures, I have improved my chances of getting to heaven.
The comments to the post are well worth a visit too.
For more on the politics and religion of stem cell research, see here and here and here.
Reading those HuffingtonPost.com responses makes me appreciate even more the literate and moderate quality of responses on this site, whatever side of an issue they attack or defend.
This is an emotional issue, with one side trying to read from the text of the ammendment in support, and the anti- side saying that (for example) where paragraph 4 says "No person may, for valuable consideration, purchase or sell human blastocysts or eggs..", this means "women will be duped into selling their eggs".
My favorite part of the anti- campaign is their pointing out that this really new type of pure research has not yet produced even one cure, so why continue allowing it? Pure research is about figuring out what can be done, and expanding our understanding of how things work, not about using existing knowledge to create a cure. Although cures have always been (and can reasonably be expected to continue to be) the end result of pure research, there is no way to accurately predict how long it will take to create a particular cure from a given technology. The trick is to allow it to continue.
This proposed amendment was started in order to quell the continuous series of attempts in the Missouri State legislature to pass laws banning this type of research. Constantly repelling these attacks was using up too much of the time and money that could otherwise be used to further the research.