Leon Kass uses the latest breakthrough to ride his anti-cloning hobby horse:

The alleged need for so-called therapeutic cloning — cloning embryos for research — is now passé. We can therefore disentangle the “life issue” of embryo-destruction from the “dignity issue” of baby manufacture, and enact a legislative ban on cloning and other degrading forms of baby-making, as recommended unanimously by the President’s Council on Bioethics: Prohibit all attempts to conceive a child by any means other the union of egg and sperm, both obtained from adults. Erecting such a barrier against the brave new world would be a great achievement, one that pro-lifers can now happily embrace without reservation.

Without reservation, except for the fact that Dr. Kass can never explain why they should, other than that he personally finds the concept of cloning humans disgusting (though whether it's more or less disgusting than eating ice cream in public, I'm not sure he's ever quantified).

Creating and raising cloned humans is a completely separate topic from therapeutic cloning (which is why I still think that they should come up with a different phrase for it). The latter has no intent to create a human being--just to create spare parts for one. There may be a good argument to be made that there is something intrinsically immoral or problematic with cloning humans, but I've never heard Dr. Kass make one. He's just trying to hijack the discussion, here.

Putting him in charge of the Bioethics Commission was one of the many reasons that I'm disappointed (well, that's not quite the right word--I never had high hopes for him in that regard) with President Bush.