These are strange times in Washington. After all, you know something’s amiss when the force of the Christian Right merges with feminists of the ber-left to spearhead the same side of an issue.

The “issue” in question now is one of human cloning: President Bush expressed his desire on an outright ban of all forms of human cloning last week, to the cheers of support from both the followers of Pat Robertson and Patricia Ireland.

Huh? Aren’t these folks mortal enemies?

Apparently, as they say, “politics makes strange bedfellows.” No stranger indeed than polar opposites of the political spectrum joining hands along with the President to press the Senate into finishing what the House had already done: to pass a total ban on human cloning.

Note the lack of modifier there – as in, a ban on all cloning, including “therapeutic” cloning, under which a blastocyst is created for the purpose of using its stem cells.

Naturally, the two sides have their own reasons for pursuing the ban – conservatives on the vaunted principles of the “protection of human life in all forms” and feminists on their cherished mantles of “exploitation of a woman’s body.” Yet with regard to an outright ban on cloning, including therapeutic cloning, each of these positions comes with its own logical contortions.

For instance, while the opposition of conservatives to human cloning is at least somewhat understandable given their leanings on the topic of abortion, what of the millions who will suffer and die due to diseases that could be treated by the stem cells in question – aren’t their lives valuable too? Further, it should be noted that none of this grim scenario about cloning humans for stem cells would have even come about had they not exerted such enormous pressure upon the president in August to render his “Solomonian” decision to limit federal funding to research on existing stem cell colonies.

Rather, had they relented and allowed research to occur on discarded fetuses from fertility and abortion clinics, the need for “therapeutic cloning” would be outright marginal at best. Perhaps thinking out the alternatives would have served conservatives better right now.

Feminists and other members of the left are hardly better off, though. For one, where are feminists with regard to one of their most celebrated mantles, “the woman’s right to do what she wishes with her own body”?

Namely, why exactly are feminists now telling women that they cannot implant and give birth to a clone if that is their wish? Furthermore, it is somewhat ironic that the same folks who declare the fact that a blastocyst is not a person with the same moral status or legal rights as you or me (and can simply be disposed of at will) are suddenly so quick to prevent such a “non-entity” from being used for the good of humankind?

Yet the majority of the blame rests only with President Bush, who now rather ironically is seeking to close any possible gaps open in August for medical science to operate in. Did the president honestly believe that limiting the available supply of stem cell colonies for research would simply close all other avenues of research with it? Or did he simply not think this far ahead in time?

Most of this, however, has simply been an issue of therapeutic cloning, somewhat removed from the more dicey issue of “reproductive cloning,” the type of cloning most people are more familiar with.

Feminists and ultra-conservatives alike have been painting a grim scenario of secret laboratories carrying out eugenics experiments on an unsuspecting populace, of “X-Files”-like scenarios in which unsuspecting women are kidnapped, their ova stolen and their wombs used for some dark government experiment. Yet all of this ignores much larger issues at hand – namely the rights of parents who, for one reason or another, simply wish to use cloning as another avenue of carrying on their genetic lineage.

For instance, what of an infertile couple who, having other options fail, decide to simply create a clone of one parent to finally be able to have a child who bears a blood connection? Where, pray tell, is the “exploitation of a woman’s body” or the rampant disregard to human life occurring here? What compelling interest does the state have in this particular case if under precedents such as Roe v. Wade it has none?

The only remaining argument to be made in this case is the ethical question – namely that the technology does not exist yet to safely clone human beings with any reasonable consistency.

Why then, should the government be so quick to head off the issue before the ethical questions of cloning are even relevant?

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Wednesday, “There is resolute, determined, universal opposition to cloning for creation of human beings.”

Senator Daschle, consider this dissent.

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Fla.