Week Three

 Krayton Kerns
1.24.07

We did it.  House Bill 96, an Act Revising the Establishment and Funding of State Veterans ’ Cemeteries has passed Second Reading in the House 95-5.  We had to amend the bill on the floor to clarify that the Board of Veterans’ Affairs has the authority to establish and oversee the certification criteria.  Additionally, the amendments define that the legislature is authorized to approve the establishment of any new State Veterans Cemeteries so certified by the Board. 

Now the bill will travel to the House Appropriations Committee where the majority of the statutory funding we are asking for will be removed.  That is their job.  Statutory funding are dollars that are automatically allocated every legislative session until some future session passes new legislation prohibiting it. 

 Currently there are two established and operating certified State Veterans’ Cemeteries: Helena and Miles City. There are two in the planning and /or construction phase:  Missoula and Laurel.  This means any money allocated by Appropriations will be split four ways once Laurel and Missoula are up and running.   

HB 96 will come back to the House floor for third reading and another vote, and then it is off to the Senate to go through the same process.  I am confident it will survive.

House Bill 215, an Act Banning Human Cloning has passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on a party line vote of 10-7.  Next stop is Second Reading in the House where there will be a very lively debate.  The public hearing certainly was. 

 I am carrying HB215 to ban human cloning for two reasons:  Human cloning is morally and ethically flawed and it is scientifically and mathematically a disaster.  I will explain the logic behind the science on my website because there is insufficient room to do it here.

 In a snap shot, to use human therapeutic cloning to create recipient-specific embryonic stem cell lines to cure diabetes in the 17 million Americans afflicted you would need:  All 71 million American women of reproductive age to surgically donate 25 eggs.   The cost for step one is $3.4 trillion dollars which is almost half the national debt.  Step two requires us to kill the 1.7 billion embryos we created so we can collect the desired embryonic stem cell lines.  Morally, that level of death makes the Holocaust seem like an outbreak of Chicken Pox.  Step three: we guide these embryonic stem cell lines to produce insulin.  Once created, these cell lines are injected into our 17 million diabetic patients.  Laboratory results suggest we will induce cancer in 26% of the patients we are trying to help.  They will die.  Is that good science?

 I am carrying HB 215 because we must never create science policy based on hope and good intentions.  Adult, not embryo, stem cell research is proving to be the logical solution to the ailments of our time and that is the direction we need to continue.