It's a tribute to the stubborn two-headedness of America's religious extremists that they saw nothing inconsistent in their fierce fight for Terri Schiavo's life and their equally ferocious opposition to stem cell research. President Bush and political conservatives included.
No one can guarantee what miraculous cures for disease might unfold in stem cell research. But perhaps even a cure will be unlocked that would've prevented Terri Schiavo's vegetative state from a calamitous chemical imbalance. Fanatics who would save Terri persist in a lunacy that stem cell research and its life saving potential is an abomination.
However, not everyone has joined President Bush's hold-back-the-future mentality. States with vision are leading the way in stem cell research with local funding.
California started it: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an idiosyncratic Republican, launched an ambitious $300 million-a-year stem cell research program. Other states—New Jersey, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts—quickly followed. Suddenly, corporations with science products and services and high-salaried workers are relocating to stem cell research states.
Just as the Catholic Church wrongly condemned physicist-astronomer Galileo to cruel denunciation in the Inquisition as a "heretic" for his views of the universe, stem cell research pioneers endure a modern Inquisition born of ignorance, fear and ecclesiastical hostility reminiscent of the Dark Ages.
In time, their accusers will be proven indefensibly wrong.
