Success Quote by Virginia Foxx

Foxx isn’t asking a question so much as staging a verdict. The opening “why in the world” signals outrage, not curiosity, and it lets her frame the debate before any opponent gets a sentence in. By stacking adjectives into fixed labels - “unethical, failed” versus “ethical, successful” - she turns a contested scientific and moral landscape into a binary consumer choice: one product is rotten, the other proven. That’s not argument-by-evidence; it’s argument-by-category, designed to make dissent feel irrational or uninformed.

The real target is legitimacy. “Embryonic stem cells” carry moral heat in American politics because they implicate embryos, abortion, and religion-inflected ideas of personhood. Foxx folds that moral charge into a claim of practical incompetence (“failed”), pairing conscience with supposed results so supporters look both immoral and foolish. Adult stem cells, by contrast, are positioned as the clean alternative: ethically uncomplicated and already delivering. The implied message to voters is: you can be pro-science without touching the third rail.

The kicker is the closing line: “Because they do not know the difference.” That’s the subtextual cudgel. Instead of treating supporters of embryonic research as people weighing tradeoffs, she recasts them as ignorant. It’s a classic political move: reduce an ideological conflict to an information deficit, which flatters the in-group as enlightened and absolves the speaker from engaging the strongest counterarguments. In context - congressional fights over NIH funding and bioethics in the 2000s and after - the quote works as a soundbite that converts complexity into moral clarity, then uses that clarity to police the boundaries of “acceptable” science.