A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on May 2nd, 2010 in US News

This post started out with an unbelieving laugh:

Now, I think Arizona’s actually gone off the deep end, or they’re playing a practical joke on us now. Because now they’re going after minotaurs.

Following the link gives you this:

The Arizona state Senate on Thursday passed a bill making it illegal for a person to “intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.”

The bill, which passed 16 to 12, would prohibit anyone in the state from “creating or attempting to create an in vitro human embryo by any means other than fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm.”

The measure would also outlaw “transferring or attempting to transfer a human embryo into a nonhuman womb,” “transferring or attempting to transfer a nonhuman embryo into a human womb” and “transporting or receiving for any purpose a human-animal hybrid.”

The stupidity here is astounding.

First, there is nothing about minotaurs. That line indicates the author really hasn’t bothered to learn much about genetics research.

Second, the law is stupid on several accounts. A human embryo, whether created in vitro or anywhere else, can only be made by joining a human egg and a human sperm. If someone manages to figure out how to join a human egg with a non-human sperm (or the other way around); then the result would not be a human embryo. Example – a donkey egg is joined with a horse sperm and the result in a mule…not a donkey and not a horse.

Then there’s the part about transferring human embryos into a nonhuman womb is a bit of a red herring, as well. Sort of. It depends on how one defines “human embryo” and based on the problem immediately above, I don’t put a lot of faith in the Arizona legislature’s ability to define it properly. What the law literally means is that some other mammal can’t be used as a surrogate mother for a human embryo – the living result of a human egg being fertilized (it should be obvious that this would have to be by a human sperm).

What I think it is aimed at is outlawing the use of human stem cells in lab animals. Why would anyone do this? There are reasons. I don’t know enough about the research to comment on its benefits or costs, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to try and regulate this area of research.

The problem, of course, is that such regulation must be done with an understanding of the subject matter. None of the research described in the National Geographic article, I believe, would be banned by the Arizona law. Even injecting mice with human brain cells to see if they develop human brains is so far from the actual definitions of the words in the Arizona law that it wouldn’t be impacted – unless, of course, the law is widely construed. And if that is the case, then heart surgeons are going to have to quit using bovine and porcine valves to save human hearts.

Unfortunately, instead of picking at the legislature for passing a law on a topic they obviously don’t understand enough to even write a sentence about competently, TAPPED decided to just view the whole topic with derision. To adapt Jeremy Rifkin’s quote in National Geographic, one does not need to be a radical religious freak to wonder about the wisdom of possibly growing a human brain in a mouse.

Sphere: Related Content