Cloning

Because they know that it is, in fact, a slippery slope. They are basically saying to anti-clone people: Look, i'm a superstitious nut-job just like you and I don't want to do any crazy Whole-Human cloning. ('cause I can't quite do that yet anyway without a big risk of fucking it up) If you just let me do this very medically important organ-cloning, then, hey, i'm with you on the whole person ban.
(Anyway, once people get used to running around with cloned hearts that work fine and save lives and the sky doesn't fall, it will be easy enough to say: "well, what about this poor lady whose 1 year old got killed in a freak accident and she lost her uterus during delivery and can't have any more kids and ... surely it's ok to clone HIM" and SOME country is going to let us do it anyway, so why not just repeal these antiquated laws from way back in the early 2000's when they were living in the dark ages and afraid of science.) At the risk of turning this into a gun control argument, it is similar to some gun control lobby saying:
"No no no no we DON'T want to ban guns altogether, just SMALL guns that are easy to hide - *ahem* what's that? that was last..., this week it is...? oh o.k., sorry, - i mean LARGE guns, yeah that's the ticket, we still think it's ok for law abiding citizens to own SOME guns but these particular.... It's a good example because it comes at it from a totally different angle, but the basic similarity is that in both cases the attempt is to convince the muddle-headed middle-of-the roaders that their postion is the reasonable balanced one, and hey, they're not radical, they just want what's reasonable.

You're probably right. I had considered the fact that he was being disingenuous. But if so it is such obvious pandering I wonder how effective it is. In fact, the pandering was so transparent I didn't automatically assume he was disingenuous. His statements are really remarkable.

Another great quote from a politican: "Cloning human beings is wrong. It is unethical to tinker with human life," said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa. A ban must be passed, he said, "before this unethical science comes to our shores." And of course, our dear prez weighed in: "Human life is a creation, not a commodity, and should not be used as research material for reckless experiments," Bush said last month. God are you there? Can you stop creating all these creationists? They're going to be the death of us.

Re: cloning human babies. There is a good case to be made for disallowing the practice at this time, as there is a liklihood that the resulting child will be rife with genetic defects. As I understand it, the cloning of mammals thus far has resulted in sufficient numbers of ailments and other physiological observations that would suggest that it would be unethical to purposefully create a human life using our current technology. Another consideration is the matter of consent. Given the substantial amount of information we DON'T have on how well human cloning will go, one could appropriately reason that the object of the experiment isn't getting any say in a medical procedure that will bear directly on his health and well-being. In anticipation of some of the counters, parents and others make plenty of dumb decisions regarding whether or not to make babies, and their freedom or ability to make dumb decisions now should in no way confer on them the ability or freedom to make dumb decisions in a new arena. For the record, I've met at least as many anti-theists, if not more, that are a much graver threat to personal liberty and the advancement of knowledge than the bible thumpers. Perhaps it's a byproduct of living in Kalifornia.