{"id":1609,"date":"2005-10-05T12:41:29","date_gmt":"2005-10-05T12:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/good-job-california.html"},"modified":"2005-10-05T12:41:29","modified_gmt":"2005-10-05T12:41:29","slug":"good-job-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/good-job-california.html","title":{"rendered":"Good job, California"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prop. 71=Disaster<\/a><\/p>\n

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L<\/strong>ong ago in November of 2004, the people of California voted for a ballot proposition that would spend around $6 billion (including interest charges) on cloning and embryonic stem-cell research. It was a strange campaign, vastly lopsided (pro-cloning spending was around 50 times that of the opposition), aided greatly by the late and somewhat unexpected intervention of Gov. Schwarzenegger, and driven by some of the worst hype in the history of American politics. The people of the nearly bankrupt state were promised cures and also cash returns on their investment\u2014within five years. It was said that before principal repayments fell due, there would be cost savings from the cures that would more than cover the vast costs of the project. <\/p>\n

Too good to be true? Well, snakeoil has been sold before. As I pointed out (with Jennifer Lahl) in a San Francisco Chronicle<\/a> op-ed before the vote, if you make that kind of claim in an IPO rather than a ballot measure, you can go to jail.<\/p>\n

Much has happened since. The bond issue is being held up by court challenges. Liberal supporters of the proposition, including Deborah Ortiz, its key booster in the state senate, have woken up to some of the huge problems it raises\u2014not least, the facts that profits from any "cures" that result will not go to the state and that poor women may be used as egg farms by researchers. <\/p>\n

On top of that, a bizarre scheme has been hatched to get nonprofits to fund research while the money is held up in court.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}