How To Confront

There's a good discussion going on at Mirror of Justice about how to effectively give witness the Church's teaching on the fundamental dignity of human life.

This is especially topical for me here in Missouri, as I have been struggling on how to most effectively oppose Amendment 2, which will enshrine in our constitution that nobody can get in the way of using embryos for research. (And by the way, where are all those people who were weeping over the purity of the Constitution when it was proposed that it define marriage as it has always been defined... And while I’m ranting parenthetically, the thing is being promoted as ensuring Missourians have “access to cures.” Is there any chance a law preventing Missourians’ access to cures would pass? But there were actual court rulings establishing same sex marriage, but we kept hearing about how “unnecessary” these amendments were).

Amendment 2 has been promoted by a series of treacly ads about the potential benefits of the research that don't even attempt to address why this research is controversial. The ads would be no less true if they were promoting the most brutally unethical type of research imaginable, such as forcibly seizing newborn babies, killing them and harvesting their organs. Just tell people it’s about cures and they’ll go along.

The main opposition to this has been to say that the Amendment is deceptive, and that “it’s cloning !!!” My concern is that if this tactic works in this election, it won’t work going forward.

I suppose the word cloning tests well, because people think of reproductive cloning, which gives them the creeps. But this is therapeutic cloning, which the Church considers even more problematic since the cloned embryo is necessarily destroyed. So the Church’s positions are nearly opposite those of the public. We might be able to get past this by conflating both using the word “cloning,” but I suspect only once, and it feels dirty (similar to how those on the other side conflate adult and umbilical cord stem cell research, which nobody opposes, with embryonic stem cell research under the term “stem cell research.”)

Maybe the best place to oppose this is on my knees.