Hey, cures don't come cheap, you know. If the man feels he has to sell out to a party that might possibly get him a cure lined up, I suppose that's enough for him to justify pimping the Dems' entire platform on the basis of one comparatively minor issue.
And before anyone starts in with any kind of sensitivity horseshit, yes, I have/have had relatives suffering from Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, and other diseases that could supposedly be cured more rapidly through embryonic stem cell research than through other forms of stem-cell research - in the time period that this debate has been going on. But none of them have supported embryonic stem-cell research.
If you really want to tie this to the abortion debate - and most of you should already know my argument concerning that - then no, I don't believe it's right to use human beings (even "potential" human beings, if you want to use that little PC tag) as raw materials from which to harvest things we find useful, no matter what the windfall might be.
Arguing the issue itself is a whole other thread, though. If you want me to say something relevant to this, Gregory Peck was elected chairman of the American Cancer Society and didn't have cancer. Self-preservation is probably the most primitive instinct of any living thing, and anyone can stand up and advocate something they have a direct stake in. But not every victim of Parkinson's is willing to send our society off down that slippery slope where other human beings are ultimately just another resource to exploit. (The opinion of one person I actually know is worth the opinions of thousands of strangers, as far as I'm concerned.) It's not like there's a guaranteed payoff - that opening the floodgates for no-holds-barred research on embryonic tissue is gonna produce a definite payoff. And if there are people who are willing to wait for another way to find a cure, that's good enough for me. If Fox is serious enough about stem-cell research that he's going all-out to promote a political party on the strength of one issue, he shouldn't be surprised by the reaction he gets.
