Kathryn Jean Lopez on Cloning & Missouri on National Review Online

October 19, 2006

As in California and New Jersey before it, cloning advocates hope to dupe Missouri voters with their humane but disingenuous talk of hope and cures to debilitating and deadly disease. A Missourian wouldn’t have to be a lazy, ignorant fool to think Amendment 2 had absolutely nothing to do with cloning — or, even better, actually banned human cloning. As it happens, in fact, anyone paying attention to the official amendment summary could be easily fooled. By means of a redefinition of cloning and other doublespeak, cloning advocates (in Missouri and elsewhere) are trying to get folks to believe that cloning only happens if you end up with the stuff of a sci-fi-movie plot — raising a cloned child; it doesn’t count, they say, when you just clone an embryo. If it’s just clone and kill, early and often, then it’s something else entirely different from cloning, they claim. (National Review Online)