Adams’s reaction to Proposition 15 is just more proof of the extreme nature of the Religious Right.
Is finding a cure for cancer pro-life and pro-family? You’d think so.
But in Texas, Cathie Adams of the Texas Eagle Forum is opposing a bond issue on tomorrow’s ballot that would provide $300 million annually over 10 years for cancer research. Proposition 15 has broad bipartisan support, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), former president George H. W. Bush and seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong.
Adams’s objection is based on the Religious Right’s rigid opposition to stem-cell research. On the Texas Forum Eagle’s Web site, the group urges Texans to defeat the cancer research plan because some of that money could wind up “funding embryonic stem cell research.”
“Scientists,” the Texas Eagle Forum’s statement continues, “are on the verge of cloning humans, injecting them with diseases and studying them, then killing them.”
Adams’s group is an affiliate of longtime right-wing warhorse Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Adams’s reaction to Proposition 15 is just more proof of the extreme nature of the Religious Right.
The Houston Chronicle reports that backers of the cancer research proposal have pointed to debate in the Texas legislature and comments from research leaders to prove that the funding of stem-cell research is not a part of this package.
The president of the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. John Mendelsohn, has assured lawmakers that cancer research can advance without embryonic stem cells. And during a debate between Republican lawmakers over the research funding project, Republican Sen. Jane Nelson, Lewisville, assured Houston Republican Dan Patrick that he was “absolutely correct” that the intent of the research proposal was not to fund or advance stem-cell research.
It should be easy for voters to see Adams for what she is – a representative of a radical strain of the Religious Right — and make their decisions about the cancer research proposal based on facts, not fiction.
© 1947 - 2008