I'm all for putting sanctimonious blowhards in their place, but stunts like this seem *really* cheap and phony. While we're at it, why not force them to pledge not to allow their minor children to make use of such treatments?

Let's win, but let's not become Lee Atwater while we're at it.

Of course it's cheap and phony. But cheap and phony stunts work, too. The unsigned pledges then become campaign commercials: "Sue Myrick voted to ban stem cell research, then voted to uphold George Bush's veto on the bill. Now she refuses to promise not to make use of the very life-saving research she voted twice to deny the rest of us. What does Sue Myrick really believe about stem cell research? Call her office and ask."

That's not Willie Horton territory. The other cheap and phony stunt I support is having the Democrats bring up a Constitutional amendment every single year enshrining a right to privacy. Almost no Republicans will vote for it because they know that's code for abortion, but they'll have to defend a vote against the "right to privacy" every election.

Meaningless stunt? Sure. And when they quit with the flag-burning and gaybashing Constitutional amendments, we'll quit hitting them over the head with this one.

not to allow their minor children to make use of such treatments?

From the Alter op-ed:
"You will notice that I did not include relatives in the pledge. They should not be made to pay for the short-sightedness of the politician in the family. And the politician's health won't suffer either. If life-saving cures are found from embryonic stem cells—and they're still several years down the road—you can bet that only fanatics and the suicidal will deny themselves the chance to live, whatever they pledged in 2006."

You know what? I'm sold. Seriously! You changed my mind. Let's do it.

GIDDYUP!

No, no, NCProsecutor, you're doing it all wrong! Comments-thread arguments aren't supposed to lead to people being convinced and agreeing with each other, they're supposed to lead to escalating name-calling and vitriol, tending (with probability approaching 1) to one or both participants being worse than Hitler.

Don't you know anything about blogs?

Don't listen to him, NCP!

lemuel pitkin is a major tool!!

And worse than Godwin!!!1!

Apo, I'm with you in part - but it seems to me that there are legitimate grounds to say that one's opposition extends not to stem cell research per se, but only to the federal funding of it. In such cases the pledge should clarify that one's opposition is to "federally-funded" stem cell research, and to the willingness to forego the benefits of such research.

I would like to see a lighter hand of government generally. Even though I'd like to see scientific progress across the board, that doesn't mean we need to have the government funding all of it.

You should also understand that any pledge like this would be pretty much politically useless, too. Certainly if a stem-cell based therapy (for diabetes, say, which is the most likely version of this) came out in a few years, where we could convert stem cells into beta-cells in a test tube and put 'em into your pancreas and they'd work, that'd be one thing (and unequivocally a use of stem cells).

But a much more likely outcome of stem-cell research is basic science. If stem-cell research affects cancer, for instance, it'd be in this way: an understanding of the basic developmental pathways and biological processes which underpin the cell, and which go wrong in diseases like cancer.

But then, what's the point? None of that kind of research would ever be only, or even largely (in a therepeutic sense) based on stem-cell research. And in a way, SC research would touch on every drug you take, or every treatment your doctor prescribed. What then? You'd never be able to point at a patient and say, "this person is making use of research that he refused to fund." People who insisted on this would only come off looking like thugs ("He didn't want me to try and cure my child's disease using the latest in medical technology!"), there'd never be any upside.