Campaign Begins Against Stem Cell Cloning Lies

A coalition of social conservatives — including legislators, anti-abortion groups and some religious organizations — kicked off on Monday its campaign to defeat a likely ballot proposal aimed at protecting some forms of embryonic stem-cell research.

[State Rep. Jim ]Lembke and other group members contended that the ballot proposal was really about "cash, not cures" — a slap at the Missouri Coalition for Life Saving Cures, the group of business leaders, politicians and research facilities that is behind the ballot proposal.

The other Saturday, I had to make a trip to the Post Office. As I was walking to the front entrance, I saw a woman stopping people to sign some petition. I asked her the nature of the petition and was told it for the "Life Saving Cures/Cloning Ban." I told her and a man who was looking it over that the petition was based on a specious lie, that it did not ban human cloning, and that humans would be sacrificed to the altars of "pseudo-scientific research", and money.

The petition gatherer told me she had another on some tobacco tax, which I declined. After entering the Post Office and getting to the counter, I asked the clerk why, in violation of the law, they permitted petition gatherers on the property. I was told that they had called the O'Fallon Missouri police department (illustrious public servants who are incapable of even directing traffic) and that they were unable to do anything about it. About all those cops can do is run a radar gun and write tickets - when it comes to enforcing other laws, it appears that they are a notch or two below the Keystone cops.

Anyway, as I left I saw the woman who was previously gathering petitions, climb into a minivan with Illinois plates apparently getting ready to leave the area. I wonder why the "Life Destroying while Searching for Cures" group resorts to outsiders (non-Missourians) to gather their petitions? Maybe they work for less?

The Post-Dispatch article continues:

The supporting coalition is busy collecting the signatures needed to get on the November ballot a proposed state constitutional amendment that would protect allow all embryonic stem-cell research allowed under federal law. The coalition says the protection is necessary because of repeated efforts by social conservatives to persuade the state Legislature to ban such research, especially a procedure called somatic cell nuclear transfer. (SCNT)

There are, indeed, efforts to ban cloning which is the direct murder of an innocent human being. It is not necessarily "social conservatives" who are opposed, but those who believe in and follow the natural moral law. It is beyond any doubt that both reproductive and therapeutic cloning immorally generate a new human life - a living human being, a person. But therapeutic cloning is worse in that this new human life is created solely for the purpose of destroying it at the embryonic stage, in his or her earliest moments of life.

We are constantly bombarded with the lies and distortions by "St. Jack" Danforth and his band of cronies that opposition to this ballot initiative is no less than the denial of a cure to persons with serious diseases or other sufferings. Yet not one example can be offered by them to support such a specious claim. These "compassionate" individuals do not appear to understand the immorality of the act of destroying a life to achieve their stated end or goal. They must, in effect, reject the biological and scientific facts that these human lives are human.

With respect to SCNT:

"This is human cloning, and they’re ["St Jack" and the Missouri Life Saving Cures group] lying to the public," said Jaci Winship, executive director of Missourians Against Human Cloning. She and other members of the group flew around the state to hold several news conferences kicking off their campaign.
. . .
Donn Rubin, chairman of the Missouri Coalition for Life Saving Cures, contended that it was the opponents who were circulating falsehoods. "This argument about profits is absurd and insulting," he said.

Yes, it is absurd and insulting to those who have the brains and the intellect to understand what is behind this whole initiative. There are reasons why the ballot initiative is wording in such a way as to deliberately deceive the public and altruism is nowhere to be found. Whether or not these people realize it or not, the practice of human cloning creates a class of human beings whose inherent dignity is despised and rejected and who become mere slaves, property in effect, to satisfy our whims and desires. We deprive them of their most basic rights.

In the words of Father Pacholczyk, "[t]herapeutic cloning sanctions the direct and explicit exploitation of one human being by another, in this case, the exploitation of the weak by the powerful" (Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Stem Cell Research, Cloning and Human Embryos, Washington, D.C.: Family Research Council)

The Post Dispatch article is here.

Other information (and credit) for this post came from Archbishop Burke's Column, Safeguarding Human Life: The Very Beginning, available at the St Louis Review or here.