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October 29, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the ‘right’ to abortion to trump free speech in Oklahoma.”  That was the reaction of Personhood USA’s Gualberto Garcia Jones to today’s decision by the Supreme Court to decline to take up Personhood Oklahoma v. Barber. In the case the pro-life group sought to overturn last spring’s decision of the Oklahoma Supreme Court which stopped a pro-life citizen’s initiative before it was even placed on the ballot.

The proposed amendment would have defined “person” as “any human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being to natural death.”

The Oklahoma attorney general had approved the ballot title and summary, and Personhood Oklahoma was in the process of gathering signatures in order to place the issue before the voters, when the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and others filed a lawsuit claiming the proposed amendment was unconstitutional. Ten days later, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the initiative violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Commenting on the case, Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, said, “The Court’s decision not to take up the Oklahoma Personhood initiative has no precedential value. The issue is not about the merits of personhood but about whether a state court can interfere with the rights of citizens to gather signatures to amend their constitutions.”

“On the issue,” Staver added, “the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision is wrong.”

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Jones told LifeSiteNews that the news has spurred their efforts in Oklahoma as they have launched another initiative campaign today.  “We won’t allow the people of Oklahoma to be denied any democratic avenue to express their opposition to abortion,” he said.

Jones suggested that it may just take “tyranny” for good people to react. “And the judicial tyranny in Oklahoma is almost complete.”

Staver concluded, “The time has come for government to acknowledge what science has long recognized – that human life begins from the moment of conception or fertilization and should be protected in law from its earliest beginnings.”