All Eyes on Kansas: The Battle for Marriage Equality Boils Over, Putting Conservatives on the Defens

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/all-eyes-kansas-battle-marriage-equality-boils-over-putting-conservatives-defensive

All Eyes on Kansas: The Battle for Marriage Equality Boils Over, Putting Conservatives on the Defensive



Tom Witt had planned an ambush. The burly director and lobbyist for Equality Kansas who moves and talks more like a Marine drill sergeant than laid-back Kansan, had spent days working to pack a state Senate hearing room with surrogate parents, babies on their laps, their grandparents and doctors. They came because Republican Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, the Committee on Public Health and Welfare’s chair, brought up her bill last January to criminalize yet another practice that didn’t fit the religious right’s vision of family. Her bill primarily targeted same-sex couples that wanted to adopt and raise children.

The powerful senator started by thanking Witt sarcastically for the no-standing-room turnout, which she said would deter her supporters from speaking. She then sat stone-faced as witness after witness testified that their kids and homes were normal and healthy. After the hearing ended, Pilcher-Cook boiled over, and began lecturing the families that they had created children with no connection to biological parents, dooming them to difficult lives. The mothers and fathers yelled back, No, no, no—you’re wrong.

“This is about the whole anti-gay industry in the state,” said Witt, who has seen many discriminatory bills like that one surface in the legislature. The field general of the Kansas equality movement won the day, as Pilcher-Cook's bill died right there—but not the long struggle for statewide acceptance, inclusion and equal rights. That was made clear just 24 hours later.

One day after the surrogacy bill circus died down, across the sprawling capitol in Topeka, Republican Lance Kinzer, the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs chair, abruptly decided to take up another anti-LGBT bill, one that quickly gained national attention and could have had even broader discriminatory repercussions.

[RKP5637]

1. I hope Kansans are finally recognizing the horrifically bigoted people they like to elect to

office are working hard to continue to make Kansas the laughingstock of the nation, not only socially, but financially as well with something like a billion dollar deficit looming because of the damn fool tea baggers they gleefully allowed to be elected into office

... because many moderates and democrats sat home on their asses during the midterms and did not vote allowing religious wackos and ultra conservatives to rule the day, because they organized and voted while others were too lazy to GOTV.

[dangin]

3. I'm in one of the blue counties in ks. There are three out of 105.

The rural counties, some with no towns over 2000, elect these people to our house and senate. Most of our reps do not have a college education. Politically, I live in a wasteland.

[Dustlawyer]

5. Right there with you! Our public schools used to be great, for the white folks at least.

The "black" schools got the hand me down equipment, books... Now they all suck and have for many years with a lot of corruption in our public school system. We were voted the least educated city in America this year.. Anyone with money, white people, send their kids to private schools.
A couple of years ago we were voted the most depressed, despite having a lot of relatively high paying jobs in all of the refineries here (Keysone Pipeline would end 20 miles away at the refinery gate)!
We get 99% Tea Party ads (Wendy Davis has a commercial that airs once a day it seems). Since these Tea Nutters compete only against each other they try to out Tea Party each other. It's a real Republican Dystopia, er, I mean Utopia! For some reason, all of this Republican crap depresses me, but I am not smart enough to figure out why?

[Sienna86]

2. Will be interesting to see if the majority of Kansas vote these folks out.

I have hope.

[PADemD]

4. Make room in the clown car.

From the article: Sam Brownback is planning on running for President in 2016?

[RKP5637]

6. Kansas, a wonderful place to be from

as in GONE!