Mom’s not a big threat. She wheels along in her electric chair puttering about in her Wautoma home making her way from her bookcase to the TV and back again. She even continues to vote Republican and calls me every election season to tell me who she thinks I should vote for. So why does Mark Green hate my Mom?

Mom’s got MS.

For now it’s incurable. Multiple sclerosis is a progressive disease and many believe the best way to find a cure is through stem cells and stem cell research.

Unfortunately for Mom, Mark Green has a record of being against stem cells and stem cell research. Now, one of the big special interest groups that is backing Green, Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL), is making the unsubstantiated claim that stem cells create tumors and are dangerous.

Green is staying quiet on this new claim, knowing that most people with common sense would compare the WRTL claim with the crackpots who wear tinfoil hats to protect from alien mind probing rays. At the same time Green is the beneficiary of the WRTL campaign cash so he’s just hunkering down hoping nobody will notice.

I noticed.

Mom’s still in a wheelchair.

The crazy thing is that Mom will probably vote for Green and she’ll call me before the election and tell me that I need to vote Republican. I’ll lovingly tease her that MS affects the mind too. Then she’ll once again tell me that I need to move to Wautoma and run for State Senate and I’ll tell her there is absolutely no chance of that happening. Then she’ll tell me that her Pastor told her to vote Republican again, and I’ll remind her that her Pastor is an unpatriotic idiot who doesn’t understand the concept of the separation of church and state — and besides, why doesn’t she come back to being a good Catholic, the one true faith, I tease, so that she has a chance to enter the pearly gates.

Yeah, Mom’s fun in a nutty sort of way but the fact is that she’s never going to walk again. She’ll never gain full use of her speech. She’ll never stroll through a park and she couldn’t dance with me at my wedding. She was never able to play hide and seek with my son when he was small and, because of the MS, she probably won’t see him graduate high school or college. As for grandchildren, well, she probably won’t be around to see them.
It’s too bad. Stem cell research could really help Mom.