The Ballot Summary of the cloners' Amendment 2 that you will read in the voting booth on November 7
completely misrepresents the full 2000-word text of the amendment.
To correct this injustice, Missouri Roundtable For Life is publishing this weekly series
on the principal deceptions of Amendment 2.
Section 7 of Amendment 2 will force Missouri taxpayers to fund human cloning without any control or oversight. The section reads as follows:
"[A]ll state and local laws, regulations, rules, charters, ordinances, and other governmental actions shall be construed in favor of the conduct of stem cell research...No state or local law, regulation, rule, charter, ordinance, or other governmental action shall (i) prevent, restrict, obstruct, or discourage any stem cell research... or (ii) create disincentives for any person to engage in or otherwise associate with such research."
This is astoundingly broad language. NO governmental action can discourage stem cell research, including cloning, in ANY way, regardless of the intent of the governmental action even if the intent has nothing to do with cloning.
This language will create a perpetual taxpayer funding entitlement for cloners.
Should Missouri ever fund any biomedical research, it will have to pay for cloning, since the funding of some biomedical research without the funding of cloning will be construed as creating a disincentive to clone, regardless of the intent of the legislature, and therefore will be unconstitutional. Any expenditure of state funds, whether from an existing pool of money or otherwise, is ultimately paid for by the taxpayers, since money is fungible. Thus the taxpayers will be funding cloning.
No taxpayer funding of cloning or embryo experimentation can ever be reduced, since any reduction of funding will be an unconstitutional disincentive to clone. Even if cloning research yields no results, funding cannot be cut.
Nor can the taxpayers reduce the funding of any institution that clones human beings, even if the funding has nothing to do with cloning and regardless of the reason for the reduction. Any reduction in funding to a cloning institution, public or private, can be challenged as an unconstitutional discouragement of cloning.
Amendment 2 threatens to be an automatic one-way ratchet upward, requiring Missouri taxpayers to provide ever-increasing amounts of money for human cloning to private institutions with multi-billion dollar endowments, without any legislative control whatsoever. Why should we surrender control over our tax dollars in this way?