Ohio’s Advertiser-Tribune.com editorial board draws stem cell ethics into its well-written opposition of public-funded ESCR today. Read the entirety for yourself, but here’s the open and close:

Politicians often prefer to delve into an issue that pulls heartstrings rather than engage in the often harder, much less glamorous work of doing things like building fiscally responsible budgets. So now we have congressional Republicans, who seem to have forgotten that voters put them in the majority to get busy on issues such as tax and entitlement reform, wandering into a needless confrontation with their own president over federal subsidies for morally perilous stem cell research.
A casual observer could be forgiven for believing that the future of such research hinges on federal funding, or for believing that the debate is between “scientific progress” and flat-earthers. For that is how the issue is cast by the Beltway media hoard. The stem cell research lobby is more than happy to capitalize on well-intentioned emotional pleas for research funding, for the focus on the emotive handily distracts from what is really a classic effort to extract subsidies from taxpayers for things the private sector can do itself. It would be wrong to ignore the moral peril involved in stem-cell research….
Meanwhile, private industry, which stands to reap huge financial rewards if stem cell research results in the development of new treatments for particularly dreaded diseases, has invested millions in research and is doing just fine without help from the government. That research will continue, with or without the fat subsidies proposed on Capitol Hill.