Big Matt Attack

Cole says that, from what he understands, Missouri fertility clinics do not destroy the leftovers, in part because of a state statute that says the life of each human being begins at conception.

"There may be other questions to consider about freezing embryos, but freezing them does not appear to be equal to killing them," Cole says.

These "other questions" can apparently wait for answers, as long as infertile anti-abortion couples still need science to help them make babies.

Bartle likes to startle liberals with a list of the major democracies that have banned therapeutic cloning: Germany, Norway, France, Switzerland, Australia, Canada.

"What I will welcome," he says, "is when the same forces that are on the left side of the political spectrum speak up as they did in Europe and did in Canada, and that really hasn't happened yet -- at least not yet in Missouri. It may be that we don't have enough out there to even be heard."

Some on the left do oppose therapeutic cloning. There are feminists who worry that the need for eggs will result in the exploitation of poor women. The executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, a women's health advocacy group in Boston, wrote a recent editorial in The Boston Globe that raised concern about the "substantial risks to women's health posed by the extraction procedure," which requires donors to take powerful hormones.

There are environmentalists who worry about fooling with Mother Nature. "Cloning of any kind is a step toward genetic engineering -- toward improving human beings. In other words, toward leaving the nat-ural world behind," Bill McKibben, the author of The End of Nature, wrote in a 2002 New York Times op-ed piece.

But whereas Bartle talks about welcoming the left, he does not appear to extend much of a hand in that direction. The three Democrats who co-sponsored the bill oppose abortion rights. (Victor Callahan was one of them.) The lone female sponsor is Norma Champion, a Springfield Republican whose late husband edited the magazine of the Assemblies of God church.

"I wanted everybody to co-sponsor my bill that possibly could," Bartle explains. He says he had an informal meeting with the Sierra Club on the topic. But the Missouri Sierra Club tells the Pitch that it has no position on therapeutic cloning.

Bartle says the cloning debate is "more mature" in other countries. Other countries' solutions, however, do not necessarily look like Bartle's. Canada prohibits cloning but allows research on embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, despite the howls of the religious right. The United Kingdom allows therapeutic cloning, but only under strict government supervision.

The debate in the United States, in contrast, has been more of an all-or-nothing proposition.

"We feel like there's a third way that hasn't been pursued," says Marcy Darnovsky, the associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a liberal group in California that opposed that state's decision to invest $3 billion in stem-cell research. Darnovsky says her group would rather see the United States follow the direction of Canada or the U.K. than pass legislation like Bartle's.

As much as Bartle would resent being characterized as a prissy fundamentalist, some of his actions point squarely in that direction.

The taxes and regulations he wants to put on strip clubs and adult video shops, for instance, would put many of them out of business. His bill would require any "sexually oriented" business to charge a $5 entrance fee and close at 10 p.m. Strip-club patrons would not be allowed to tip the dancers. The state would impose a 20-percent tax on gross receipts. (Bartle would give the money to schools.)

Bartle's bill aims to stop what he calls the "aggressive, in-your-face expansion" of sex shops around the state. But it would also affect businesses such as Valentine Video in Westport.

"We would have to shut our doors" if such a bill became a law, says Kelly Boessen, Valentine's manager.

Valentine Video rents mainstream titles, but X-rated films count for more than half of its revenues. "We're right next door to Blockbuster," Boessen says. "Our niche is kind of adult films."

Dick Bryant, a Kansas City lawyer who represents adult businesses in their court fight against the Bartle-written law that limits billboard advertising, says Bartle's new proposal is "just ridiculous."

Bartle says the law is needed because adult businesses have become more brazen, especially in rural areas along highways. "Let me tell you, if you're from outside the state of Missouri and you drive into Cooper County and there's a men's bathhouse over here on one corner and there's three or four smut shops, what do you think? I wonder if that's reflective of that community's values."

The sex trade along I-70 is a mixed bag. The billboards for Passions, a store that sells videos and sex toys at two locations along the highway, are reserved, their blue-and-red color schemes reminiscent of Dairy Queen's.