Indiana, Arkansas – Kansas had them beat by a
couple of years. Our legislature passed a religious
freedom law in 2013, granting Kansans the right to
discriminate before it became quite so fashionable.
That was quite a year, a stellar legislative session
known for such gems as the “Community Defense
Act,” a laughable attempt to legislate morality by
throttling nudie bars; it withered before too many
people could take it seriously.
We also had Senate Bill 109, which, among other
things, was to ban cities, counties, school districts and
other public agencies from lobbying legislators; the
bill declared it a criminal act to contact or attempt to
contact a legislator without his or her permission.
That was also the session in which we heard from
the great healer, State Rep. Virgil Peck, a Republican
from Tyro, who opined during committee discussion
of a bill affecting immigrants, that one solution might
be to make sport of shooting at them from helicopters;
in an instant, Peck had pared the searing complexities
of immigration law to little more than hunting feral
pigs from the air.
And then, in the wake of the Newtown school mas-
sacre only weeks earlier, our legislature responded
to the wrenching issue of firearms regulation with
the “Second Amendment Protection Act.” House Bill
2199 declared that the federal government had no
power to regulate the gun and ammo business in
Kansas; felony charges awaited any federal agent
attempting to enforce federal gun laws in Kansas.
In two short years we’ve gone from sport-shooting
“illegals,” raiding nudie bars, and arresting federal
agents, to creating a billion-dollar budget deficit and
religious “freedom?” How does this brilliance hap-
pen?
WE elect it, that’s how.
Successive right-wing routs in three state elections
have given license to extreme lawmakers itching to
whack away at the civilities impeding life as they
want it to be; our “liberties” are threatened by laws
demanding equity or fairness, by statutes requiring
open government and full disclosure, by regulations
that protect certain segments of our society from the
cruelties and malfeasance pounding the poor, the sick,
the aged and infirm. Dominance at the polls, they
believed, gave permission to strike back, to permit
citizens and corporations to live as they pleased with-
out the intercession of law.
“Freedom” is the timeworn refrain and, as it turns
out, a catchword for intolerance. In 2011, for example,
we had the “Health Care Freedom Amendment,” a
flimsy and ill-fated poke at the Affordable Care Act, a
plan to amend the state constitution by preventing laws
that offered federal subsidies for health insurance.
The state’s “Preservation of Religious Freedom
Act” allows citizens, essentially, to skirt state or local
law if its enforcement would violate a “sincerely-held
religious tenet or belief.”
The Kansas, Indiana and Arkansas laws are of
course from the same template; the outline and most
specifics of ultra-right legislation flooding statehouses
is not the product of local initiative, but the concoc-
tion of minions at the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), a right-wing think tank that churns
out conservative dogma in legalese for rubber-stamp-
ing by state legislatures. One state’s free guns law is
pretty much like another’s. The same goes for legis-
lation addressing abortion, voter IDs, immigration,
health care, school finance and other issues.
Republican legislators have turned to ALEC for
most of their stunning, if ill-fated, legislation: A bill,
widely publicized, to prohibit the courts from recom-
mending suitable finance for public schools; House
and Senate bills which re-defined “meeting,” allowing
*
public officials new ways to bypass the state’s open
meetings laws. In 2012, you will recall, the governor
invited select lawmakers for dinner at Cedar Crest to
lobby them about the state budget. The secret meet-
ings were found out. The bills were retaliation for the
press’s being so nosy about officials conducting public
business in private. This year, attacks on the press
were continued, mostly in legislation to help cities and
counties move publication of legal notices from local
newspapers to obscure government web sites. This
was remarkable, if only in the notion that Republicans
thought it a splendid idea to put governments in con-
trol of their own information.
THE FLAP over religious “freedom” embraces far
more than the moth-eaten paranoia that citizens’ Bible
study is somehow threatened by enforcing the speed
limit, or a local ban on shoplifting. In Colorado and
Oregon, for example, the scuffle began when a local
bakery refused to provide a wedding cake for a gay
couple. The courts ruled that religion is no excuse for
discrimination; this only enlivened campaigns for state
laws that set stronger ground rules for discrimination
by religion.
But religious “freedom” serves far more than those
offended by gays, lesbians and trans genders. It
includes parents who may have unusual rites in child-
rearing, inter-sibling marriage, or the number of wives
a husband can own; pharmacists who have a problem
with certain medications and birth control; employ-
ers who object to providing insurance coverage for
employees, or at least that part that includes birth
control; hospitals, under religious ownership, faced
with conflicts in medical ethics; physicians who may
not reveal treatment options for critically ill patients,
if those options include procedures to limit or end the
ability to reproduce.
Does religious “freedom” permit an employer to
reject a job applicant because of the applicant’s reli-
gious or political preference? It’s not a big leap from
that matter to the question of skin color.
Kansas is among 32 states that have enacted, or are
considering, laws that allow discrimination based on
religious “belief.” The legislation is sometimes pared
(See Indiana and Arkansas) to lessen the risk of rejec-
tion, leaving a modified form of discrimination on the
books. After all, there is always time for a more radical
approach after the next election. Skin color, and sexual
or religious preference, can wait.
IN KANSAS we divert attention by providing certain
discriminations in our new election laws. The cover
story, from Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is that the
laws will rid us of phony voters. (We don’t have any,
and never did.) Our new laws are designed to get rid
of unwanted voters, not phony ones. That means no
coloreds at the polls, starting with the Mexicans. Proof
of citizenship for new voters, starting with passport
and birth certificate, is bound to keep the poor, the
disenfranchised, the weak, and elderly, for starters, far
from the ballot box.
“Proof of citizenship” laws are the ethnic voter
cleansers crafted by Kobach to bring purity to our
elections and crackpot candidates into office.
THIS IS how we arrive at disaster, with voting laws
straight from the Jim Crow notebook and a legislature
that insists on a right to hate. Purity at the polls and
religious “freedom” by statute are packages at cross-
purpose, both proclaiming liberty while forcing on
citizens an iron doctrine of exclusionary holiness.
Some freedom, indeed.
*
*
*
– JOHN MARSHALL
