After years of lies and deception, on Tuesday news broke from the world of science that there are indeed dramatic, significant, and exciting alternatives to embryo-destroying stem-cell research. Researchers — God bless them — were able to reprogram regular ol’ human skin cells into embryonic-stem-cell-like cells. The Brave New World debates are heading into a whole new world, one where there’s a whole lot more room for a practical life-affirming compromise.

While the full implications of the news are still unfolding, one thing should be crystal clear to any reasonable person willing to look at the facts: Those who oppose embryo-destructive research are not heartless; and Rush Limbaugh does not hate sick people.

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Where does Rush Limbaugh fit into a story about hard science? Let me back up for a moment to the worst election-campaign moment in my lifetime: the day Christopher Reeve died. “Superman” died about a month before the 2004 presidential vote, and his death was, of course, waked in a media frenzy. That same day, at an event in Iowa, John Edwards, then the Democrats’ nominee for vice president, said: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

The usual suspects were outraged. But he was not universally condemned as the shameless demagogue that he is — as a heartless political charlatan who was promising hope based on nothing at all but his desire to have an East Wing suite.

The real lionizing was being saved for the next Election Day — those infamous 2006 midterm elections, when stem cells would be the object of an emotionally charged circus, wearing many a sick celebrity’s face. In 2006, advocates of a Missouri ballot initiative were pushing a referendum that would create a constitutional right to human cloning, all the while claiming to be banning human cloning. You can ignore that last fact, though; most advocates for it did. Voting for the initiative, they said, would work miracles. Voting against it meant you hated sick people.

And so, by that logic and rhetoric, leading the hating-sick-people pack was Rush Limbaugh (at least in the minds of the drive-by world that has allowed itself to be a willing tool of the manipulative biotech industry and their willing pols).


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