I always said the Rick Santorum was vulnerable in PA because his opponent was very much like him on some key issues. One of the most important was now Senator Casey’s vote on Embryonic Stem Cell Research:

The life-saving issue of stem-cell research returned to the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, and Pennsylvania’s two senators, unfortunately, are still a study in contrasts.

Republican Arlen Specter voted for the bill, which passed 63-34 and would ease President Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. He has also pledged to vote for it again to overcome a promised presidential veto. (Mr. Bush rejected last year’s bill on the same subject.) The state’s other senator, first-term Democrat Bob Casey, did not join the new Democratic majority in providing more support for the measure and voted against it.

I am serious about the comments I have made there is no need for a Republican Party if it caves on Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR). This is not abortion – or even close. Yes, human beings die but the motives and rationale are completely different and sickening in the case of ESCR. Abortion is the decision of the mother to sacrifice her child for reasons only really known to her. I would love to work out ways to make abortion for convenience (financial, emotional, etc) a thing of the past. But here the mother is making a decision about her baby (or babies in the case of multiples were ”reduction’ is sometimes mandatory to save as many as possible).

ESCR is not the same thing. It is not a decision by the parents for their convenience. It is a decision by some desperate people to kill humans for pesonal gain. Abortion decisions, even those for convenience, tend to be about avoiding hardship. These ESCR decisions are a hope to gain personally from the spare parts which can be grown from those parts of the human being pulled out for that purpose. So we have a hard personal decision in one case verses an act of predation on the other.

But what is even worse about this is ESCR is NOT proven to do solve ANYTHING. And for some reason (again, desperation comes to mind) the scientist are not even required to show in animals their process will work first. Humand and Primate embryos are nearly identical. And there is a infiinite supply of Primate embryos, and therefore Primate stem cells, for researchers to work out how they will make this all work. So there is no emergency in the research world and no need to make the exception in this one case to prove a therapy with animals first. None.

The fact the Republican Party is not educating its people on this matter and taking a stronger stance is why the party is about to become useless. There is even a straightforward case to be made that a fetus is a unique human individual (which it is) and therefore should be extended the same rights as any other human individual under our constitution. The same DNA processes now ubiquitous in criminal cases is undeniable in its results on an embryo – the DNA of the embryo will NOT match the mother’s (it will be 50% different) and therefore, by law and science, the two are not one human being.

Sen Casey shows how the Reps can become a permanent minority party. He is fighting the good fight. Obviously the same cannot be said of a good number of other Republicans who have let personal issues cloud the guiding principles.