Steele shouldn't have backed down

Maryland Lieutenant Governor and U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele has apologized for remarks equating fetal stem cell research with the medical experiments of the Nazis.

He shouldn't have. While his sensitivity to Holocaust survivers and to the Jewish people is commendable, and while Josef Mengele and his collegues performed their experiments on a unique scale and, for the most part, on people who could walk and talk, the point of Steele's comparison remains apt: when we start performing bizarre medical experiments to cannibalize living members of our own species for the benefit of others, the essential line has already been crossed. The dignity and sanctity of human life has already been compromised- and they can't be compromised to a degree any more than a woman can be a little bit pregnant.

Steele's remarks put the fetal stem cell debate in exactly the terms in which it needs to be discussed. It simply cannot be debated with intelligence or integrity without taking into account its implications for the unique moral status of homo sapiens and the sanctity of the human individual- at all stages of development.