Republicans and Cancer

If you support the Republicans this year, any Republicans, then I’d like to send you a message: I hope you get cancer.  I know.  This is a very, very cruel thing to wish on anyone.  I don’t make this wish lightly.  I make it being 8 months out from the devastating illness and death suffered my amazing, perfect and brilliant mom.  So, why would I say such a thing?  I say it because if you support anyone in the Republican Party, you are supporting a platform of complete denial of federal funds for research on human embryonic stem cells.  Why is this their platform?  Because besides denying a woman her right to determine what she can do with her body, they believe that some petri dish fertilized egg, which will never, ever have hope of being implanted or ever developing past a small mass of cells, is a person.  And that religiously derived belief is denying you, your parent, your spouse or your child the necessary treatments and perhaps cure that you or they need.  So, if you are that selfish, I hope you come to understand why that position is vile to me.  More vile than wishing you cancer. 

Having said this, I am pretty sure that if you, your parent, your spouse, or your child got sick, you would do everything within your power to make sure that a cure was being worked on with every spare dollar the U.S. government can devote.  But right now, you clearly don’t give a damn. 

In 1998, a report was written which specified the need to approve human embryonic stem cell research.  http://www.biolchem.ucla.edu/labs/Tim_Lane/login/StemCell_pdf%20files/Gearhart.html

In June of this year, The Guardian reported the devastating effects the anti-abortion movement in Europe could have on human embryonic stem cell research.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/15/stem-cell-scientists-human-embryo-research

There is general consensus among researchers and scientists that our best hope for the treatment of cancer, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, and a whole host of other illnesses is human embryonic stem cell research.   However, given the respect to accepted scientific findings that the Republican Party has given climate scientists, I expect that there will be a scientist or two that say that adult stem cells are just as good.  So here’s a question: if you were dealing with a cancer diagnosis would you want to rely upon what a couple of outlier scientists have opined as “just as good”?  Or would you want what the best research scientists in the world have determined as the best possible treatment that might cure you…or your child?  

There are a ton of reasons I have for not supporting this intellectually stunted party.  However, I have lived with a siege of cancer this year and in the past few years.  My mother, my father-in-law, my friend’s daughter, my best friend, all passed and a slew of family and friends living with cancer actively or in remission.  And now, our friends’ sweet 11 year old is suffering a battering treatment the very report of which makes my heart move into my stomach.  No parent should ever have to watch their child get beams of radiation to his head while his head is kept still in a mesh mask.  Does this upset you?  Does this make you cringe?  Wretch a little at the thought?  That’s how I feel when I think of religious zealot politicians legislating science to the detriment of all of us.  

Please.  Do not support a party who has summarily dismissed intelligence, education and science.  Vote your conscience.  Vote as if your life depended upon it.  Hell…vote as if your child’s life depended upon it.