Big Matt Attack

There does seem to be an inordinate amount of action around Boonville, where there is indeed a men's bathhouse called Mega-Plex -- though from the outside, it's the least X-rated-looking of the sex businesses that stretch from Kansas City to Jefferson City. A banner hanging from the metal building describes Mega-Plex as merely a 24-hour "men's private spa and fitness center."

Cooper County is a live-and-let-live kind of place, says Gerald Ulrich, owner of First Amendment Video, which is near Mega-Plex. "We've got two Baptist churches, and they don't have a problem with me," Ulrich says.

Ulrich is openly gay, a Vietnam veteran and the part-time mayor of Bunceton (population 361). He says Bartle's proposed taxes amount to moblike extortion of a "mom-and-pop operation." He tries to be community-friendly, Ulrich says, closing the store at 10 p.m. "If I see somebody try to get in another man's booth or another person's booth, out they go, and they don't get to come back."

Bartle says it is not realistic public policy to try to outlaw places like First Amendment Video. (There's the concept of free expression and all.) But government can restrict certain business activities, he says.

"And the problem is," Bartle says, "rural Missouri in particular has no experience, nor do they have the financial or legal tools in their toolbox that big cities do. That's why you see what you see up and down our highways."

Bryant, the lawyer, says local governments are not as helpless as Bartle says they are. Existing laws allow restrictions on certain businesses -- where they can locate, what hours they can be open, what people can do inside their doors. Johnson County, Missouri, he notes, already charges adult businesses a 5-percent tax.

Besides, Bartle has not always supported the idea of local control.

In 2003, he voted in favor of a bill that checked county efforts to keep out industrial hog lots. The bill contained a provision prohibiting counties from enacting health ordinances stricter than state law. "What that does is take away the ability of counties to protect their own citizens from the ills and documented impact of CAFOs [contained animal feeding operations]," says Ken Midkiff, a former Sierra Club lobbyist.

The Republican-led Missouri House and Senate passed the bill, but then-Gov. Bob Holden vetoed it. Midkiff expects a similar piece of legislation to return now that a Republican is governor.

Confronted with his hog-lot vote, the normally articulate Bartle struggles to square it with his current effort to rid a different scourge.

"That's interesting," he says. "That's interesting to lay those two issues side by side. You know, that's, that's, that is interesting. I hadn't thought about it. There probably is some inconsistency there."

He pauses.

"The whole concept, the whole concept of not in my backyard, you know, you weigh it out. And maybe it does in, in my mind, you know. I guess my rationale for doing something like that is that, you know, eating pork, you know, a lot of folks feel like that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and something we've been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years. And that, you know, the sex-smut-shop industry is not on par or co-equal with a food-production industry. But, you know, I think, I think I could be criticized for being inconsistent there."

Bartle is not the only one dealing with inconsistencies. Warren Erdman is working to make Missouri hospitable to all kinds of scientific research even as he works to put Republicans in office.

Doubt that the two are mutually exclusive? On the night the Judiciary Committee passed the cloning bill, Bartle credited the 2004 presidential campaign with "bringing this issue to the forefront."

George W. Bush favors the kind of broad cloning ban that Missouri is considering. During the campaign, Republicans criticized John Kerry for his support of therapeutic cloning -- even first lady Laura Bush piled on. "We don't even know that stem-cell research will provide cures for anything -- much less that it's very close," she said while campaigning last August.

Yet Erdman worked for Bush's re-election at the same time he and other civic leaders dreaded the prospect of Bartle introducing his cloning ban in the Missouri Senate.

Erdman, a Kansas City Southern vice president, is a former chief of staff for U.S. Senator Kit Bond. The Kansas City business community values his political experience. He sits on the board of the city's leading development agency, the Economic Development Corporation, and is chairman of the Downtown Council's political action committee.

On September 18, 2004, after listening to a presentation by Stowers Institute President William Neaves, the Economic Development Corporation board voted unanimously to oppose efforts to criminalize embryonic stem-cell research.

The Stowers Institute is a research facility near the Plaza endowed with more than $2 billion from American Century founder James Stowers and his wife, Virginia. The institute wants to expand. But if Missouri makes somatic-cell nuclear transfer punishable with prison time, the institute would "have no other choice but to go elsewhere," according to a statement Stowers recently released.