Bush bravely takes anti-Humanimal stand!

My new favorite blogger PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has drawn attention to a particularly hilarious segment of the State-of-the-Union speech.

I didn't listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I'm getting a lot of "WTF?" email about this statement from Bush:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus voteÃ?‚…and we know which one has the majority here.

No one is honestly arguing that there shouldn't be some sort of ethics involved on experiments with genetics, the vague, alarmist wording of the president ignores the practical scientific uses of this kind of work.

PZ goes on, explaining better than I could possibly:

We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development.

...These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

This seems to be another example of crazy religious conservatives not thinking about the practical, real-world effects of the policies they want to enact.

The classic example, of course is the question of how women who have abortions should be punished if abortion is made illegal. (ADDED***I finally found the video I was thinking of when mentioning this, here.)

Preventing research using human-animal hybrids not only potential medicines undiscovered but would actually prevent the usage of medicines already in use against things like Crohn's Disease and Rheumatoid Arthritis.

It's easy to say you're against the creation of Dr. Moreau-style manimals. Of course you are. No one is for that. But equating *that* with the use of some strands of a molecule inside a cell with some slightly different molecules is stupid, reactionary, and callous towards those who could be helped by it.