Missouri Baptists Ready for
Cloning Court Battle
By Allen Palmeri
A
January 19th hearing before Cole County Senior Judge Byron Kinder will focus on
the inception of life as it pertains to a lawsuit supported by pro-life groups
– including the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) – that challenges the
veracity of a ballot initiative calling for constitutional protection of
embryonic stem cell research – or cloning.
Cindy Province, a Missouri Baptist bio-ethicist who is named along
with the MBC Executive Board in the lawsuit against Missouri’s secretary of
state that is 
before
Kinder, is pleased that the case has a clear storyline. The plaintiffs will
argue that somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is human cloning; the defendants
will argue that it is not.
“This
is what the whole issue hinges on,” she said. “There is no reasonable scientific
dispute that SCNT is cloning unless you are in the political arena. When a
scientist is in the laboratory, every scientist understands that somatic cell
nuclear transfer is a cloning technique, and yet when scientists come into
a courtroom or a legislative hearing room, suddenly they start testifying
that somatic cell nuclear transfer is not cloning.
Based
on his December 15th decision to allow the case to proceed, Kinder is at least
in partial agreement. The judge said that there are terms in the initiative
that even he is not familiar with, and that this is an unusual case that is
more than just a simple ballot dispute on some relatively minor issue. He even
said that he would be willing to hear more expert testimony Jan. 20, if need
be, on the inception of human life, as long as it is not repetitive.
In
other words, the proposed ballot summary written by Secretary of State Robin
Carnahan is very much in question at this point. “This is a matter of great
public interest,” Kinder said. “We’re talking about changing the Constitution
of this state.”
Proponents
of the initiative, mainly some leaders in the academic, political and business
sectors of the state, see the lawsuit as nothing more than a nuisance that has
temporarily halted their signature gathering. The group they back, the Missouri
Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, posted a December16th update that brushed aside
the merits of the lawsuit. “We expect the court will deal with it quickly,”
declared one post on their web site. The group needs to collect 150,000
signatures by May 9th to get the initiative on the November 2006 ballot.
“There’s
some arrogance there,” Province said. “There’s some blindness there in terms of
just not looking at the facts. It’s just not intellectually honest to use the
term ‘cloning’ one way in the lab and another way in the media, and yet that’s
what they’re doing. Eventually, that duplicity is going to come out.”
The
pro-life Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is acting as the lead counsel for the
plaintiffs. David C. LaPlante, an ADF attorney from Olathe, KA, is head of a
two-man team that is being supported by Larry Weber, attorney for six Catholic
bishops in Missouri, and Michael Whitehead, MBC lead counsel. LaPlante agreed
with Province that the case boils down to the judicial interpretation of two
competing definitions of SCNT – by two different sets of experts – that will be
presented in the courtroom January 19th.
“We
want to put forth expert testimony that somatic cell nuclear transfer is human
cloning,” LaPlante said. “Voters in Missouri, if they are going to vote for
this, to amend the Constitution, will know they are voting for human cloning
in Missouri.”
Allen Palmeri is a staff writer for the
Missouri Baptist Convention state newspaper The Pathway which can be read on line at www.mbcpathway.com.
Publisher’s
Note…
At
press time, the January 19th hearing on the lawsuit by Missourians Against
Human Cloning and other pro-life groups and citizens against the initiative
petition was still scheduled with a ruling by Cole County Circuit Court Judge
Byron Kinder expected at any time after the hearing. According to Samuel
Lee of Campaign Life Missouri, regardless of the outcome of the ruling, it is
expected that one or the other side will appeal Judge Kinder's ruling to a
higher court. We will give you a full update in the next issue of the MetroVoice.
UPDATE
FROM THE PUBLISHER…
On
January 19, despite overwhelming testimonies to the fact that the Missouri
Coalition for Lifesaving Cures’ initiative petition language was clearly deceptive
and misleading, Judge Byron Kinder ruled that the language was acceptable
thus clearing the way for petitioners to begin collecting signatures in order
to put the human cloning constitutional amendment on the November 2006 ballot.
