About that ‘ban’ on human cloning

OK, I’ve given the rest of the news media 10 days of grace to correct their mistakes in reporting the administration’s position on human cloning. I think that’s enough time to figure out that you got a story 100 percent wrong. Time’s up. Let’s set the record straight.

Like a bunch of cloned sheep, every major news organization in the United States — AP, UPI, the New York Times, Washington Post, even the Washington Times — reported on June 11 that President Clinton wanted to ban the cloning of human beings while the debate continues on the moral implications of the procedure.

Unless you read very carefully, skeptically — dare, I say, cynically — you might have believed that cloning human beings was off limits for the next four years or so. Unh-uh. Just the opposite. As usual, with this administration, the devil is in the details. The ugly truth is deliberately obscured. And this issue is a perfect example of how they do it with the complete cooperation of an adoring and trusting news media establishment.

So, what did the president’s policy really propose? Only a temporary ban on cloning “for the purposes of creating a child.” In fact, the real story is that the administration supports virtually unlimited, unregulated experimentation in the science of human cloning as long as a full-term baby doesn’t result from it.

As long as a baby isn’t permitted to be “born,” there’s no problem. Of course, such a policy is just what you would expect from an administration that supports even the most hideous form of abortion — the partial-birth procedure in which the child’s skull is punctured, its brains sucked out and crushed, even while its little wiggling feet and fully developed torso have been extracted from the mother’s womb.

Clinton’s plan is based on the recommendations of a bioethics panel he selected to study the issue. It found that it is “morally unacceptable” to create a child through somatic-cell nuclear transfer cloning and implant it into a woman’s body for delivery.

Notice how clever these folks are: It’s OK, apparently, to create the baby in the laboratory, perform hideous experiments on it, even implant it in a womb. It just can’t get out alive. That part would be morally unacceptable.

One has to wonder from where these folks derive their moral values? Are they based on gut feelings? Are they based on editorials in the New York Times? Are they based on public opinion polls?

In typically Clintonesque posturing, he told researchers to avoid the final act of producing actual walking-around human beings through cloning because that would threaten “the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society.”

Well, tell me what’s sacred about vivisection on pre-birth babies? Do sacred family bonds only begin on the day of birth? Is that the point to which our society has degenerated?

OK, I’m obviously disturbed by this decision. Frankly, I think most Americans would be, too, if they only understood it. And that’s my point. Why is the press putting such a happy face on this development? Why isn’t anyone reporting the simple, straightforward facts in good, old-fashioned inverted pyramid style.

There’s an old newsroom truism that it ain’t news when dog bites man. But it is news when man bites dog. This is not a dog bites man story, but that’s how the establishment press played it — without exception. This is a man bites dog story. Or, more to the point — man creates baby, experiments with it for nine months, then kills it.

The headline on the Associated Press story read: “Clinton Advocates Ban on Cloning of Humans: Research Involving Animals, Genes Would Be Allowed.” This isn’t a headline, folks, it’s propaganda. And it’s scary that the American people are forced to rely on a controlled press for basic information about what their government is doing and what their tax dollars are subsidizing.