Lines

President Bush exercised the first veto of his long and horrifically damaging presidency last week when he shot down a bill that would have allowed for Federal funding of stem cell research on embryos that were to be otherwise disposed of. His reasoning was that using embryos - even unwanted ones - for medical research crosses a moral line that he felt should be left un-crossed ( you know, unlike that moral line of preemptively attacking and over-throwing a sovereign government that poses no threat to our land or our people). Basically, he decided that medical research in curing many diseases and disorders - both physical and genetic - should suffer at the expense of allowing garbage collectors to have a few more medical waste bins to empty.

Obviously, the bigger picture is that he's in favor of saving embryos, regardless of their origins or viability as actually developing into a fetus, at all costs. That's fine. I can understand that stance even if I don't respect it. But the reality is that that stance is hampering medical advancement. The research is being done any way - in Europe and Asia and through private and state funding (thank you governator!!!). He and his blind Religious Right supporters are against this research from going forward, too. Quite frankly, I'm surprised the Pro-Life movement isn't a little more proactive in picketing research facilities that conduct the research on these unwanted embryos. And here's the next leap of logic which I think is quite frankly a small hop and not a leap at all: shouldn't the Village Idiot and his cohorts find any medical treatments that are developed as a direct result of stem cell research abhorrent and unnatural? Since they are partaking in actions which hinder these treatments from being developed, shouldn't they and their direct family members be denied these treatments?

I think so. Bush as drawn a line in the moral sand, as has been the trademark of his presidency. His previous lines have either attempted or succeeded in making us pay for Howard Stern (which, by the way, is better on Sirius than it has been on terrestrial radio in a long long time); preventing gay from having the rights of breeding citizens; and denying our enemies at war (his word, not ours) any rights at all, whether basic human or those supplied by the Geneva Convention. His entire platform is based on telling us what we can and cannot do. Well, why should he or his ilk reap the benefits derived from "immoral" means? He is constantly fighting for his morals to be everyone's laws. He'd like killing fetuses - and by logical extension embryos - to be illegal. So isn't receiving these ill-gotten treatments as bad as knowingly accepting money from a coke dealer and buying a car with it?

It's his line, not ours. I think it's only fair that everyone place their name in the books now and realize that their kids one day, if they should be unfortunate to fall out of a tree, won't be allowed the treatment that might help them walk again. You're defining the line for the great majority of us, so you have to live with the consequences, Mr. Village Idiot. You and everyone that holds that same line. And maybe, just maybe, having to sign that book would make them realize exactly how their holy rolling impacts the rest of us.