A Stitch in Haste

Oh Brave New Candidate:

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, said on Thursday his administration's new restrictions on stem cell research are aimed at heading off an "Orwellian" future.

The state's Department of Public Health this week issued regulations banning the creation of embryos for research purposes.
...
"I believe it crosses a very bright moral line to take sperm and eggs in the laboratory and start creating human life," Romney told reporters. "It is Orwellian in its scope. In laboratories you could have trays of new embryos being created."

I suspect Governor Romney means, not "Orwellian" but rather "Huxleyan" ("Huxleyian"?):

From the Social Predestination Room the escalators went rumbling down into the basement, and there, in the crimson darkness, stewing warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the moving racks crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.

You see, an Orwellian world is one without privacy rights, and one dominated by censorship, revisionist history ("memory holes"), government control of the dictionary ("Newspeak"), never-ending wars against ever-changing enemies, and so on.

In other words, the world of George W. Bush (and, no doubt, a potential President Romney).

So for the Massachusetts Mormon to warn about an "Orwellian" future, is, well, a bit Orwellian. Go figure.

Don't people read the classics anymore?