"We should not use public money to support the further destruction of human life," proclaimed the man who led his country, under false pretenses, into a war that has destroyed the lives of more than 1,600 American men and women, and traumatically altered the lives of more than 20,000 others.

The cost in public money? More than $200 billion and counting. But then, who's counting? After all, freedom is on the march.

On Tuesday, while Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives were approving legislation that would provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, George Bush, darling of the religious far right, was holding forth over at the White House on the sanctity of human life in a media event orchestrated by Karl Rove; human life in this instance being clusters of unused embryonic stem cells, many if not most of which are routinely destroyed.

Better to have them destroyed, apparently, than used to advance scientific research that might someday lead to a cure for a number of now-incurable diseases and irreparable spinal injuries.

The man who shares responsibility for the limbless, blind and emotionally devastated men and women crowding this nation's military hospitals, and for the ever-growing number of new graves in cemeteries across the land, along with the deaths of God only knows how many Iraqi men, women and children, stood amid baby-toting parents recruited for the occasion, and expounded on the sanctity of what he considers another form of human life, one without arms, legs, brain, heart or any other organs.

"Every embryo is unique and genetically complete," Bush intoned, according to The New York Times. "Every human life is a precious gift of matchless love."

Not every human life, as we've come to find out from watching Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the rest of the gang in action. Well, not them in action, really, but the men and women they have sent into action to do their dirty work; men and women infinitely more admirable than they are. Once those precious embryos -- the ones that escape the medical waste containers and make it from a test tube to a uterus by way of in vitro fertilization -- reach adulthood, they are reclassified: from precious gifts to cannon fodder.

That's life. And death. And that is what this embryonic stem cell research argument is all about. In an ideal society, one governed by enlightened, rational men and women rather than pressure group-driven ideologues, legislators would not be arguing this issue -- hope of life versus certain death -- and a president possessed of even average intelligence would not be sacrificing science to superstition.

But we're not. We're living in a country where medical researchers are being stymied by religious extremists; a country in which third-rate politicians would rather crush the hopes of individuals struggling against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, and spinal chord paralysis than risk losing the support of zealots who care more about the unborn than the born.

We're living in a country governed, nominally at least, by a man who as governor of Texas never encountered a death penalty he didn't heartily endorse, a man who has fronted for a gang of neoconservative war lovers, a man whose environmental agenda threatens the lives of everyone who breathes the air or drinks water. And that man gets up on his hind legs and tells us that every human life is precious.

Should we laugh or cry?

Rossie is associate editor of the Press & Sun-Bulletin.

© 2005 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

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