Archbishop Burke on Missouri’s loss

It’s a loss for all people of life, this hotly contested Amendment 2 just passed in Tuesday’s election. In the end, it was much, much closer than the embryo-research folks ever thought it would be, because they had been winning the public disinformation campaign hands down. Once the people started to hear the truth from pro-life forces and their own high-profile voices, they turned around, but fell just short of enough to win.

What to make of it now? Here’s what Archbishop Burke thinks:

We made great progress in helping the citizens of Missouri realize the confusion and deception of the language of Amendment 2. We have failed, however, to overcome the formidable resources of its proponents. In Missouri, we have lost a significant battle for the protection of human life. The citizens of Missouri have succumbed to a false hope created by a campaign which has played on the desire of us all to help those suffering from deadly diseases and serious injuries. (emphasis added)

And why add the emphasis? To highlight the deception that it took to pass this legislation. They played on the desire of people of goodwill and compassion to help others. And it is a false hope, trumped up to bring certain individuals and groups billions of dollars by establishing Missouri as the biotech, embryonic research and cloning ‘capital’ of the world.

Missouri’s Amendment 2 will come to be regarded as the bellwether of human cloning, and will sadly divert attention and public funds from successful and completely ethical umbilical cord blood and adult stem-cell research. It will further erode respect for all human life and for procreation as the way new human life is to come into the world. Morever, the provisions of the Amendment will make available to certain biotech companies the money of the taxpayers of Missouri for intrinsically immoral research, whether or not the research ever brings about the promised life-saving cures. (emphasis added)

The election campaign for the passage of Amendment 2 has shown us all how deeply rooted the culture of death is in our society.

And so Burke declares this a call to all people of goodwill to rededicate themselves to the work, and the prayer, that it will take to restore the integrity and inviolable dignity of life and the sacrament of marriage. That message was reinforced on election day by the victory in eight states of a statewide amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

That’s what the culture wars has brought us to, and it’s only cranking up for more of these challenges. We’re in day two now of the new campaign to preserve the culture of life.