[COEXERJ145]

At least it didn't come anywhere close to getting enough votes to override the President's veto.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

I think what gets lost in this whole debate is the devaluation of not only potential life, but also the debasement of a higher ethics that governs our views on human decency, or at the very least, that we should aspire to as a moral society.

Even conceding for a moment that using embryonic stem cells might lead to cures for heretofore intractable genetically-inherited illnesses-and I can't help but notice that the people at the forefront of this campaign were also part of the cheerleading squad for fetal tissue research, whose supposed benefits never materialized-it still doesn't resolve the fundamental moral dilemma that we're faced with.

We're being asked to denigrate, or to dismiss entirely, legitimate moral objections to the harvesting of human embryos-and theoretically, this process could ultimately bring us to the point where we are doing so on a routine basis, as happens regularly in the PRC-simply because it may-in the abstract-lead to miraculous cures for some admittedly horrible diseases.

How much harder will it be for the U.S. Congress to reject reproductive cloning, once it's accepted the essential underlying premise of the people urging them to condone the destruction of incipient embryonic life in the name of progress?