It’s heartbreaking and infuriating to read some of the coverage of yesterday’s hearings in the Massachusetts statehouse. A paralyzed man makes the case that all his hope rests in cloning embryos. How can one argue with that?

There were some attempts: A former dancer, for instance, now stricken with Parkinson’s made the case that cloning and killing embryos is passing a moral boundary. She said, according to the Globe, “[M]y suffering isn’t the real issue. The real issue is what we are being asked to do in the hope of relieving our suffering.”

There’s more to say (and I wasn’t at the hearing, so maybe it was said): I’m sounding like a broken record, but why don’t cloning advocates expend some energy not on doublespeak propaganda (saying a bill that allows cloning actually bans it, for instance—see New Jersey, California), but on alternatives that have shown actual signs of hope. I suspect I know the answer to that, of course—as Mitt Romney has seen pretty clearly, as his opponents show no interest in meeting him in any kind of compromise on using frozen embryos (again, not my ideal position, but a big deal if he won all the same), for instance. In the end, it’s cloning that’s their goal.