Human Flower Project

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Roses Sway the Delaware State House

To defeat a bill on stem-cell research, opponents came on strong, with masses of red roses in the Legislative Hall.

Legislative Hall, Dover, Delaware
Image: Penny Post Cards from Delaware

Who says politicking requires a big stick?

In Dover, the Delaware capitol, yesterday it was mounds of roses that appeared to have clobbered a bill permitting research with human embryos. The measure had passed smoothly through the Delaware State Senate last June and looked like a certainty in the House, but last week, supporters of the bill began buckling under. “The first sign that the plans might not work out came last Tuesday morning in Dover, when the roses started arriving at Legislative Hall. By the time legislators began filtering in for their opening session, the lobby was filled with their aroma. When House members took their seats, each was greeted by a vase of the flowers, each stem bearing a card with the sentiments of a constituent who opposed the legislation.”

The campaign had been organized by a group called A Rose and a Prayer. Dedicated to opposing human cloning and embryonic research, this organization revived the red rose, a symbol of the anti-abortion movement since its early days. The Delaware group solicited donations “to cover the cost of purchasing and sending a rose to your legislator as a message that you want him or her to vote No on Senate Bill 80.”

The pro-life movement has delivered red roses to political leaders for at least two decades, in Washington, D.C., in Nebraska, in Missouri (though these were silk roses), and elsewhere as fragrant photo-opportunities. Flowers—or so many people appear to believe—can seize the moral high ground in a controversy, a quiet claim that “Nature” (perhaps God) is on “our side.”

Did red roses actually change the outcome of the stem-cell vote in Delaware? We don’t know. We DO know that “Roses…sent to lawmakers to represent constituents opposed to the measure, flooded Legislative Hall offices last week,” and that’s when favor on the Sentate Bill began to deteriorate. And we know that despite months of careful groundwork to move the bill through, yesterday “the House voted 32-3 in favor of a gutted version of the bill that sets a $1 million fine for human reproductive cloning and a $100,000 fine for sale of a human embryo.”

Proponents of stem-cell research might want to drop by a flower shop there in Dover for a consultation.