do not harm or destroy human embryos." As an alternative, Cornyn supported the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act to aid research into techniques of deriving pluripotent stem cells without harming or destroying human embryos. In 2019, when asked about an Alabama law that prohibited abortions (even in the case of rape or incest), Cornyn said it was an "Alabama state issue". Civil rights and law enforcement In the 2004 debate surrounding the Federal Marriage Amendment, Cornyn released an advance copy of a speech he was to give at The Heritage Foundation. In the speech, he wrote, "It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right... Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife." According to his office, he removed the reference to the box turtle in the actual speech, but The Washington Post ran the quote, as did The Daily Show. Cornyn sponsored a bill to allow law enforcement to force anyone arrested or detained by federal authorities to provide samples of their DNA, which would be recorded in a central database. He voted to recommend a constitutional ban on flag desecration and for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. He also voted for the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act and extending its wiretap provision. In a February 24, 2019 tweet, Cornyn mocked dictatorship, centralized power and democratic socialism by quoting Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini as saying "We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become." On June 25, 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Cornyn tweeted, "Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education" in response to former President Barack Obama condemning the reversal of Roe in part because of its standing as "50 years of precedent". Representative Joaquin Castro, who interpreted the tweet as advocating the return of segregation in schools, condemned the tweet as racist. Cornyn continued in another tweet, "Thank goodness some SCOTUS precedents are overruled"; Brown had overturned more than 50 years of precedent regarding the doctrine of "separate but equal" as defined by Plessy. President