Jonathan Freedland today is actually rather good. Yes, of course his piece is biased, biased in a direction I don’t agree with, but it’s fair bias, well expressed. What do columnists exist for if it is not to explain the world to us through their own distorting lens? I would however quibble with one little part:

The campaign has hardly been fought on this ground. If anything, John Kerry has had to go along with the intrusion of religion into politics – insisting on his own Catholic credentials, telling audiences that he was once an altar boy. But the tension is there.
It has manifested itself in the issue of research using embryonic stem-cells. Kerry says it should continue, using new lines of cells if necessary; Bush wants no more lines to be created, no more of what he calls the destruction of life. Kerry says stem cell research might have found a cure for Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimers or for Christopher Reeve’s paralysis. Bush says the work will have to stop.

The issue is not, in fact, the creation of new lines or not. The only difference in the two positions is whether the new lines should be created with Federal money or not. The statements “You may not do this” and ” The Government will not pay for you to do this” are rather different, in both moral and practical terms.
It is also worth noting that the Catholic teaching, something which Kerry promises to uphold each time he takes Communion (and which Bush has not) is that all research on all foetal stem cell lines is evil and should stop now. Even if a treatment were found that, for example, allowed the halt and the lame to walk again, it would be sinful to use it. This very issue came up in the UK a decade or so ago when a new German Measles (Rubella) vaccine was introduced. The Catholic Church instructed parishioners not to use it, for it had been created from the corpse of an aborted foetus. The basic moral point: Good cannot come from evil acts. A good point I think, one we could do well to remember.