You’ve got to hand it to them. Those who support legal cloning play the politics of it well. In the Boston Globe today, the editorial board turns what should be the pro-cloning advocates’ handicap around on Mitt Romney. In a Globe editorial today, the editors write: “If an embryo created by cloning is human, then so is one created, but not used for, in vitro fertilization. To be consistent logically, Romney should oppose in vitro fertilization.”

As I’ve said before, I don’t like that Romney is for using frozen embryos for medical research, but by doing so he is clearly willing to meet folks who want to do embryonic-stem-cell-research half way (and for those who oppose cloning–he is the guy to side with if you want to keep the door closed on cloning in Massachusetts and the subsequent domino effect in other states to come). We shouldn’t be in the business of creating new life, Romney says, but if there are “surplus” embryos available with no designated place to go, they can be used. But we should not, he says, be in the business of “cloning and killing” as creating embryos for use in medical research has been dubbed.

But that’s not enough for those who support not just stem-cell research in general, not just embryonic-stem-cell research, specifically, but cloning embryos for that research. As Romney put it in a press conference in February, “All of the rhetoric has been, ‘We are throwing away embryos — surplus embryos — that could be used for stem-cell research and that makes no sense.’… And now, now that I’ve said, ‘Ok, I support that,’ now [the other side says], ‘No, that’s insufficient. How could you possibly limit it to that?’ Well, that’s what they’ve been asking for.”