By Ron Fitzwater

I was looking around for a topic this week and, as usual, I was looking for something to complain about. Problem is, it has been a good week for our family. Our son John has come home from Iraq and, for the first time in six or so years, we don't have a kid in combat or scheduled to go anytime soon. I mean to tell you, that is a welcome feeling.

Also, the clan has added a new member with the birth of Jamison Patrick Fitzwater to our son Carl and his partner, Sandra. You know grandchildren are evidence of our immortality and by the end of spring Carla and I will have 10 of them in total.

Now I love my kids, but man I really love my grandkids. Thinking of them got me thinking about the recent Presidential executive order on stem cell research and all of the controversy and discussion across the country about it and, I have got to tell you, I just don't get the debate.

Why is this even an issue? Is it really the whole right to life fight again? If so, both sides need to just lay down their signs and go home.

Look, both right and left are guilty of being hypocrites on the whole sanctity of life subject, and until the lefties agree that abortion is the termination of a life just as capital execution is, and the righties agree that the life of a mass murderer is as much a life as an undeveloped fetus (what happened to forgiveness like Jesus taught?) then the fight will never end.

A couple of notes just so you know where I stand: first, I am a big supporter of killing killers, child molesters and international terrorists, and I am totally against keeping them housed for years upon years on my tax dollars. Second, I am a believer in the Clinton policy on abortion in that they should be legal, safe and rare. Finally I want to point out that there are a lot of people on both sides who do use common sense,, and the numbers are growing but the loudest voices are still the ones we hear.

What that causes is that the possible uses for stem cells in finding cures for disease and injury will never come and many, many people will live and die miserably. So I think it was a great thing that the President will now allow government money to go toward research. If, that is, they can spare some from all the corporate bailouts.

Now I don't understand the science involved with the procedure of doing stem cell research, but I do know that the cells they use are miniscule in relation to what cells are needed to be a person. To illustrate the numbers we are talking about, one paper I read recently said that stem cell research uses hundreds of cells and there are tens of thousands of cells found in a fly's brain. Get it? Fewer cells than are found in a fly's brain are used for any given stem cell research project. Also if there are not enough cells to even form a fly's brain, there are not enough cells to make a person and those cells are leftovers anyway.

Do you know what happens with leftovers like that? They get destroyed. They are not going to be people or flies.

So, isn't it just common sense to use these leftovers, these byproducts of life, to maybe save a few lives?

If one of my grandchildren were to get sick, how could it be justified by the anti-stem-cellers that they will never get well and possibly die because the leftovers had been thrown out for moral reasons. Sort of like letting a starving man die of hunger because the restaurant would rather throw the food in a locked dumpster than throw the man a doggie bag out the back door.

Of course that idea isn't very popular, and one of my friends asked me what death penalty opponents had to do with my argument.
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Simple, if it's alright to harvest leftovers from births and aborted fetuses, then we should also make it legal to transport all death row inmates from across the country to a special medical wing at Johns Hopkins or another teaching hospital where they can be humanely executed and their organs harvested to help those people waiting for transplants. Let their last act in this world be one of helping their fellow man. If you are going to take lifesaving byproducts from the unborn then take them from the recently deceased. And before the religious right gets going on how wrong this all is, remember God made us smart enough to figure this stuff out, so why fight it.

Throughout time, new discoveries and techniques have often been treated as religious blasphemy or immoral behavior, or just downright crazy. Look into the history of inoculations; the first guy to come up with that idea must have had a hard time selling it?

Stem cell research may save many lives and it does not take any to do it, like my prisoner organ farm idea does.

My advice is to support it. Better to spend money learning to save lives than, well, anything else we could spend money on. They can have my tax dollars for it any day.