HB 76: When does a cloning ban have something to do with abortion?

You'd be amazed what can be hidden deep in the bowels of proposed legislation.

Cloning prohibitions are trendy in state legislatures these days, much like anti-porn internet laws were several years ago.

There are two problems with this, only one of which is the rampant scientific illiteracy throughout our nation (including many of our legislators).

The biggest concern is the definitions.

Consider HB 76, which includes the following:

(g) An ‘organism’ is a living whole being, an individual, even if that organism is compromised of just one cell.

(h) A ‘human being’ is a living whole human organism, a human individual, from the beginning of the single-cell stage onward, produced by any means.

Notice what this language does: by law it defines human life as beginning at conception, which lays some important groundwork for later placing restrictions on abortion.

Please understand that I am not taking a position for or against abortion here; the issue is intellectual honesty.

Do you seriously believe that the bill's three sponsors and eighteen co-sponsors all missed this?

If not, you'll be interested in the complete list:

Sponsor:
Rep. Joseph Miro (R-22nd)

Additional Sponsors:
Sen. David McBride (D-13th)
Sen. Charles Copeland (D-4th)

Co-Sponsors:
Rep. Terry Spence (R-18th)
Rep. "Biff" Lee (R-40th)
Rep. Don Blakey (R-34th)
Rep. Joseph Booth (R-37th)
Rep. George Carey (R-36)
Rep. Benjamin Ewing (R-35th)
Rep. Gerald Hocker (R-38th)
Rep. Gregory Lavelle (R-11th)
Rep. Vincent Lofink (R-27th)
Rep. William Outten (R-30)
Rep. Daniel Short (R-39th)
Rep. Pamela Thornburg (R-29th)
Rep. Gerald Brady (D-4th)
Sen. George Bunting (D-20)
Sen. Colin Bonini (R-16th)
Sen. Catherine Cloutier (R-15th)
Sen. Gary Simpson (R-18th)
Sen. John Still (R-17th)

If there is anyone on this list known to favor legal abortion, you may want to send them this post.

As for those legislators who are opposed to legal abortion, that's also their right, but you might want to ask them if they intentionally signed on to support this "Trojan Horse" language.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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