I could talk about the Boston Globe all day (don’t worry, I won’t). Columnist Joan Vennochi basically dismisses much of the Right on every hot “social” issue of the day. She closes: “The easiest thing to understand about stem cell research is that it is another political football in the bitter ‘culture wars;’ just like gay marriage, abortion, and Terry Schiavo’s right to live or die.” Those crazy ring-wingers, they’re just being divisive again.

She explains what’s going down in Massachusetts in terms from the great medical text, her own paper, the Globe: (Seriously–she tells us: “To write the above paragraph, I drew upon a detailed explanation offered by The Boston Globe.”)Romney supports the use of embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, which might be discarded anyway. He opposes ”therapeutic cloning” or ‘’somatic cell nuclear transfer.” That involves taking the nucleus of a cell such as a skin, heart, or nerve cell and implanting it in a human egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed. The egg would be stimulated to grow in a laboratory dish for several days until it becomes a ball of about 200 cells called a ”blastocyst.” Researchers then develop a new batch of embryonic stem cells from this ”blastocyst.” The egg is never fertilized, so supporters such as Travaglini and Kennedy say scientists are not creating life.

Rather than a preeminent medical dictionary, Vennochi has got the new talking points from the pro-embryonic-stem-cell/cloning side down pat. In chatting with folks about this line of thinking—that somehow there are not new embryos really being created, because, frankly, the folks promoting the research don’t want you to believe they are, one close observer of these issues reacted:

It’s painfully frustrating to see people speak this way, and other people fall for it. So the cells don’t go into an embryo but into an egg…and it’s not a fertilized embryo…ah huh. OK. So what is it? And if you implant it and transfer it, what is it then? What is Dolly? An unfertilized sheep? And these people are supposedly on the side of science.

Political football? Try key issue of our day. Muddle it all you like, it’s not going away. Unfortunately, it will continue to be muddled. And that’s not likely to mean a good end result for anyone concerned with the dignity of human life.