Human cloning is deeply troubling our president. He said so himself in a strongly worded speech yesterday afternoon. He spoke in alarming terms of a society where “human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered for custom specifications.” This draconian description of a pro-cloning world was almost shocking enough to mask the glaring double standard in President Bush’s speech.

As he continued his diatribe by spouting cloning inevitabilities like “embryo farms” and “exploitation of women’s bodies,” it was easy to get enraptured in the fight against medical evils and forget who was speaking.

President Bush looked straight at his audience and unflinchingly said, “No human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another.”

This coming from the man who had, on average, one prisoner executed every two weeks for the entire five years of his term as governor in Texas. Execution can only be described as the “extinguishing of a life for the benefit of another.”

Death-penalty advocates argue that when a person knowingly kills another person, he forfeits the right to live. When a criminal kills an innocent it is murder, but when the government kills that criminal in turn, it is “justice.” A rose by any other name is still murder, it doesn’t matter who kills whom first.

Under Texas law, murder of a corrections-department employee is a capital offense punishable by death. Murder by a corrections employee, however, is a day’s work.

The alternative is life imprisonment. Execution proponents say that this is an unappealing measure because it costs taxpayers money to keep murderers fed and cared for. According to the Texas Department of Corrections, prisoners cost $53.15 per day. However, the poison required to kill them only costs $86.08.

Death-penalty supporters say that imprisonment does nothing to appease the family of the victim. On January 12, 1996, then-Governor Bush made it permissible by law for relatives and close friends of the victim to witness the executions. The murderer is executed for the benefit of society and the grieving. Simply put, “A human life extinguished for the benefit of another.”

It’s hard not to hear the hypocrisy when President Bush says, “Our children are gifts to be loved and protected. Life is a creation, not a commodity.”

These children evidently cease to be gifts worthy of love and protection as soon as they commit the crime of murder. Then they become soulless objects, ones that cost citizens money and take up prison space.

A quick trip to texecutions.com/texecuted.html is in order. On this deeply disturbing website, under the golden Texas star, you can read the biographies and last statements of executed prisoners.

They are murderers, and they are deplorable, but they are still human beings. Poisoning or electrocuting them is no less a crime than what they committed.

The right to life wasn’t the only thing that Texas prisoners lost under Bush’s leadership. They also lost the probability of getting a fair trial. In 1996 during Bush’s second year as governor, Texas cut its budget for legal defense of death row inmates in half.

It’s absurd to argue so fiercely for some lives while callously terminating others. President Bush was on the right track with his credo of preserving life; he just needs to recognize the narrowness of his view. A criminal is no less a human being than a child is worthy of just as much protection.