Richard Cohen has an excellent column about the cloning debate in today's Washington Post.

Personhood in a Petri Dish (washingtonpost.com)
And, for the most part, if you scratch someone in favor of experimental cloning (almost no one supports it for human reproduction) you will find someone supportive of abortion rights. So this debate really is an extension of our cultural division. It is, at bottom, about sex -- how to control it, how to punish it.

Brownback and his supporters are entitled to their beliefs. But they are primarily religious ones -- a determination that life begins when they believe it does. They feel so strongly about this that, in the Republican-controlled House, they rejected a substitute bill that would have permitted cloning for medical purposes only. Why? Because ultimately, they want to declare the fetus or the electrically zapped egg a person, protected by the Constitution. To destroy it is murder. Goodbye abortion.

But this bill is nothing less than an attempt to impose a religious doctrine on the rest of us. It is not that far removed from the Vatican's attempt to silence Galileo because he supported the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun. It is an attempt by legislative fiat to stop science in its tracks: Thou Shalt Remain Ignorant.