Missouri's Amendment Two.

By now, probably every pro-lifer in America knows that Missourians narrowly passed "Amendment Two," which makes the right to clone part of the state Constitution. The loss is a bitter oneall the more so because of the layers of duplicity proponents wrapped the measure in.

Amendment Two won passage by barely 50,000 out of over 2,000,000 votes cast. While it is true that close only counts in horseshoes, it is still a remarkable accomplishment, given all the forces arrayed in favor of passage, beginning with a more than ten to one spending advantage.

The Amendment Two juggernaut enjoyed a number of significant advantages above and beyond a massive war chest. Those include:

#1. The truth gained only limited traction. The amendment was packaged as a way of safeguarding "stem cell research" from reactionary forces who couldn't see its unlimited potential.

But the real issue was never about lethally harvesting stem cells from human embryos. That was/is legal in Missouri. The hidden agenda was codifying the right to clone by encasing it in the protection of the state Constitution.

Proponents were able to seal off a real debate by clever obfuscations. For example, the technique of cloning is the same whether the human clone is dissected for stem cells or carried to term.

But by persuading large chunks of the population that only the latter was cloningand that cloning that created a source of stem cells wasn'tsupporters of Amendment Two successfully camouflaged the reality that in voting for Amendment Two the citizens of Missouri were voting for human cloning.