Let's take a moment today to salute a brave American hero. A man who saw through the amoral haze of today's society and who had the courage to stand up for what's right, even in the face of an unstoppable tide of modernity and vice. That man is Oklahoma legislator Ralph Shortey. And that fearless act of bravery was his introduction of a bill that would ban adding aborted human fetuses to food. Your babyeating ways will no longer be tolerated, Sooners. Be warned.
Oklahoma state Senate bill 1418 reads,
No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.
But it's not a hyperbolic Colbert-esque attempt at parody; it's a sincere attempt to curb fetus feasting that until now no one had addressed. Serious as a heart attack, or an ice cream sundae with a ghoulish garnish of baby feet (known in the local Dairy Queen as the "Randall Terry"), according to Rep. Shortey.
According to NPR, the bill doesn't exist because actual Oklahomans are eating actual babies, or because lawmakers want to keep fetusmnuching feminists out of the state once and for all; it's because PepsiCola contracts with a company that has used human stem cell research in the creation of new sweeteners. San Diego-based Senomyx has developed an automatic taste test using human kidney cells cultured from a cell line that originated in the Netherlands in the 1970's.
The Oklahoma bill was prompted by pro-life groups who think that Pepsi's partnership with Senomyx is tantamount to bottling carbonated abortions, even though embryos aren't technically fetuses, and using stem cells for research is about as far from a pregnancy termination as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's portrayal of Shia LeBeouf's girlfriend in Transformers III is from the Best Actress nomination.
But if you think the Forbidden Fetus Law should be filed alongside other batty paranoia-driven initiatives like Ohio and Arizona's attempt to ban human/animal chimeras, numerous drives to restrict sharia law, attempted bans on government-implanted microchips in Wisconsin and Georgia, think again. Brave, brave lawmakers like Oklahoma's Ralph Shortey are the only thing that stands between us and aborted fetuses being incorporated into the school lunch program. And don't our kids deserve to eat something better than pre-babies?