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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / What Is the Matter With the Kansas Legislature?

What Is the Matter With the Kansas Legislature?

by | 19 Comments

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I have a hard time believing they thought there was nothing wrong with this law:

The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday unanimously struck down a state law that punished underage sex more severely if it involved homosexual acts, saying ”moral disapproval” of such conduct is not enough to justify the different treatment.

In a case closely watched by national groups on all sides of the gay rights debate, the high court said the law ”suggests animus toward teenagers who engage in homosexual sex.”

Gay rights groups praised the ruling, while conservatives bitterly complained that the court intruded on the Legislature’s authority to make the laws.

The case involved an 18-year-old man, Matthew R. Limon, who was found guilty in 2000 of performing a sex act on a 14-year-old boy and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Had one of them been a girl, state law would have dictated a maximum sentence of 15 months.

The high court ordered that Limon be resentenced as if the law treated illegal gay sex and illegal straight sex the same. He has already served more than five years.

Limon’s lawyer, James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, said: ”We are very happy that Matthew will soon be getting out of prison. We are sorry there is no way to make up for the extra four years he spent in prison simply because he is gay.”

Unbelievable.

Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    ppGaz

    Unbelievable? What did we think would be the result when we allowed stupidity, gratuitous bigotry and self-conscious moralizing to become the standards of government in this country? The GOP sold its soul to the devil, and thereby legitimized this sort of crap. Why do you think the “southpaws” get so riled up?

    What’s unbelievable is that people paying attention couldn’t see the year 2005 coming. Well, we did, and here it is. Wake up and smell the damned coffee.

  2. 2.

    Jcricket

    I’m glad you agree with the Kansas’ court ruling John, but ppgaz is right. It’s hardly unbelievable. The right-wing of the Republican party wants to return to the vision of the past they keep clinging to, where homosexuals were deviants, abortion was illegal, birth control was reserved for married people, woman stayed at home, questioning the president was treason and it was legal to keep Jews out of country clubs.*

    Seriously, just on the issue of gay sex, many of the red states either have laws on the books that criminalize consesnsual gay sex between adults, or have much harsher penalties for gays than straights when it comes to any kind of “sex crime” (statutory rape, for exampe). Senator Santorum has as much as said there’s no such thing as consensual gay sex.

    A larger point is, that I think the left has actually won the culture war. In poll after poll a growing majority of people in this country support access to birth control, decriminalization of gay sex, stem cell research, privacy on end-of-life decisions, legalized abortion, and even “liberalization” of drug laws, etc. But right-wing Republicans have (as you put it) so “queered the debate” on so many issues that a small minority continues to dominate the political arena through fear-mongering and appeals to religious divides.

    * OK, so I added that last part.

  3. 3.

    Zifnab

    15 months to 17 years? What the flying fuck?! I don’t care how conservative or liberal you think you are, there’s no way you can consider such legislation anything but the most gross of double standards. If the GOP wants to grow some balls and be “tough on crime” again, maybe they should try being tough on crime across the board. I have a hard time feeling sorry for a child-molester of any sexual orientation who gets shafted with a 17 year sentence – maybe I’m just harsh, I don’t know. But when I see a law like this, I can’t help but read it not as a condemnation of homosexuality, but as a trivialization of male-female rape. 15 months against 17 years says that we take a firm stance on protecting our male youth from our male adults, but if an older man wants to trick a 12-year-old girl into having sex with him, that’s not so bad in the state of Kansas.

    No wonder they’re having an evolution debate down there. How can you get less evolved.

  4. 4.

    m.croche

    I’m not sure why John Cole is so bewildered. The controlling Supreme Court decision here is Lawrence v. Texas, which was only decided (2003) three years after Limon’s case was originally tried. Before Lawrence, Limon’s case could well have been harder to make.

    So since J.C. is so outraged over the legislature’s behavior, he might also spare some derision for conservatives who criticized the Lawrence decision, such as ledge-sitter Patterico:

    “…freedom to commit homosexual acts — which I am not opposed to — also requires a constitutional amendment.”

    http://patterico.com/2003/07/08/403/constitutional-misunderstanding-two-of-these

  6. 6.

    Otto Man

    You have to love the insanity of a system that seeks to criminalize homosexual sex by throwing the perpetrator into an all-male prison system where homosexual sex is even more likely to take place.

    Of course, Kansas is boldly beating a path to the 12th Century, so why should I be surprised?

  7. 7.

    Geoduck

    birth control was reserved for married people

    What makes you think that married people will be allowed access to birth control? (Unless of course they’re rich enough to have it discretely.. imported.. from outside the country.) They certainly weren’t in the Good Old Days; my own family history is testiment to that.

  8. 8.

    Steve S

    Just to point out the real outrageousness of this…

    Kansas initially said you have sex with a minor, you go to the big house for a real long time.

    Then in 1999 they passed the “Romeo and Juliet” law that says if the minor is only 4 years different or less… It’s no big deal. We’ll give you a slap on the wrist.

    It’s the “Romeo and Juliet” law that the court is questioning. Apparently it only applies to opposite sex couples, and the court says you can’t limit it like that.

    So essentially the Kansas Republicans are in favor of 18 year olds having sex with 14 year old girls. Or at least, they don’t want to look too disapprovingly on this.

  9. 9.

    docG

    From Wikipedia-Kansas history

    Kansas had a reputation as a progressive state with many firsts in legislative initiatives—it was the first state to institute a system of workers compensation (1910). Kansas was also one of the first states to permit women’s suffrage in 1912. Suffrage in all states would not be guaranteed until ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. The council-manager government was adopted by many larger Kansas cities in the years following World War I while many American cities were being run by political machines or organized crime. . . Kansas was first among the states to ban the concept of separate but equal schools. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka banned racially segregated schools throughout the U.S.

    Suggested new Kansas State motto:
    We haven’t ALWAYS been nuts.

  10. 10.

    wendy

    Kansas politics employs some of the same tactics that Rove/BushCo uses to rile up the base. We have politicians such as Phil Kline our current AG who is in the process of supboenaing (sp?) private medical records on women that have had abortions, supposedly to root out sexual misconduct between adults and minors (Yeah, right). Or the yahoos that have been pushing intelligent design on our otherwise excellent education sytem.

    Gay discrimination is just another way for our right wing politicos to get votes from the Fred Phelps gang. At least the judiciary isn’t buying it.

  11. 11.

    ppGaz

    Kansas was first among the states to ban the concept of separate but equal schools. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka banned racially segregated schools throughout the U.S.

    Uh, Kansas was the reason the states had be forced to abandon separate but equal schools. The Board in “Brown v Board” was the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, which was asking the court to permit it to provide separate, but equal, facilities.

    In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help. The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. With Brown’s complaint, it had “the right plaintiff at the right time.” [4] Other black parents joined Brown, and, in 1951, the NAACP requested an injunction that would forbid the segregation of Topeka’s public schools. [5]

    The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown’s case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were inherently unequal. One of the expert witnesses, Dr. Hugh W. Speer, testified that:

    “…if the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child’s curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation.” [6]
    The Board of Education’s defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not neccessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver had overcome more than just segregated schools to achieve what they achieved. [7]

    The request for an injunction put the court in a difficult decision. On the one hand, the judges agreed with the expert witnesses; in their decision, they wrote:

    Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children…A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. [8]
    On the other hand, the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy yet. Because of the precedent of Plessy, the court felt “compelled” to rule in favor of the Board of Education. [9]

    Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 and their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the case on December 9, 1952, but failed to reach a decision. In the reargument, heard from December 7-8, 1953, the Court requested that both sides discuss “the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.” [10] The reargument shed very little additional light on the issue. The Court had to make its decision based not on whether or not the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind when they wrote the amendment in 1868, but based on whether or not desegregated schools deprived black children of equal protection of the law when the case was decided, in 1954. [11]

  12. 12.

    bago

    People really need to lighten up on this whole sex thing.

    Technology is cool. It means that sex isn’t an automatic invitation to disease, pregnancy, and the classical 25% rate of death among mothers giving birth. The fundamental institution has changed. Enjoy the benefits of technology.

    Exploit it. God knows I do.

  13. 13.

    Mac Buckets

    Put this in the “Speak For Yourself” Archive:

    Limon’s lawyer, James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, said: ‘’We are very happy that Matthew will soon be getting out of prison…”

  14. 14.

    goonie bird

    Unbeleivable judicial stupididy what with these idiot judges anyway what become of their brains

  15. 15.

    Tractarian

    Put this in the “Speak For Yourself” Archive:

    So all teenage fags should rot in prison, huh, Mac?

    Before you respond by saying “I just don’t want rapists out on the street”, you should go back and RTFA. This guy was not imprisoned for sexual battery or molestation. He was imprisoned for a “sex act” with a 14-year old. It was probably completely consensual.

    Or is it that you think all Romeos, including the heterosexual ones, are a threat to you?

  16. 16.

    Birkel

    Tractarian,

    14 year old people cannot legally consent to sex. They also can’t legally contract to buy a car.

    The absence of consent is what defines rape. Once again, a 14 year old person cannot legally consent. QED, the person to be released is a rapist.

    You, sir, know not of what you write.

  17. 17.

    Zifnab

    Well, traditionally crimes are divided up into a number of degrees. Much like killing someone can be divided into involentary/volentary manslaughter, and second/first degree murder, the actual crime of rape gets chopped up into a number of sub-catagories depending on the circumstances surrounding the crime.

    Generally speaking, statetory rape – the crime of committing sex with a person too young to be considered capable of willing consent – is much more leniently punished than rape with aggrevated assualt or rape with a deadly weapon.

    Of course, the prosecutor has the choice of how a defendant is charged. If you stab a minor and then have sex with him/her, you’re probably going to be charged with assault and rape with a deadly weapon before you’re charged with the much more minor crime of statetory.

  18. 18.

    metalgrid

    m.croche Says:

    I’m not sure why John Cole is so bewildered. The controlling Supreme Court decision here is Lawrence v. Texas, which was only decided (2003) three years after Limon’s case was originally tried. Before Lawrence, Limon’s case could well have been harder to make.

    There were two ways to go about this case – one on the privacy grounds stated in the majority opinion of Lawrence vs. Texas, and the other on the Equal Protection grounds used by O’Conner in the Lawrence vs. Texas decision which did not need to be based on the Lawrence decision per se.

    So since J.C. is so outraged over the legislature’s behavior, he might also spare some derision for conservatives who criticized the Lawrence decision, such as ledge-sitter Patterico:

    “…freedom to commit homosexual acts — which I am not opposed to — also requires a constitutional amendment.”

    http://patterico.com/2003/07/08/403/constitutional-misunderstanding-two-of-these

    As a libertarian, Patterico annoys me no end. He is firmly of the opinion that an individuals rights derive from the state allowing them such rights, instead of innate rights that an individual possesses. His understanding of the constituion as a limit on government power is also lacking. To his suggestion that in order for an individual to engage in homosexuality there would need to be a constitutional amendment, I put forward that there needs to be a constitutional amendment before the state can get involved in regulating homosexuality since ‘we the people’ need to empower the state to do so. Blithering idiot that he is, I wish Miers would get confirmed so he’ll jump (https://balloon-juice.com/?p=5874) and put him out of our misery.

  19. 19.

    Tractarian

    14 year old people cannot legally consent to sex. They also can’t legally contract to buy a car.

    The absence of consent is what defines rape. Once again, a 14 year old person cannot legally consent. QED, the person to be released is a rapist.

    You, sir, know not of what you write.

    It might surprise you to learn that I used the word “consensual” in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense.
    So, to make it easier for you to understand, substitute the word “voluntary” for “consensual.”

    I am not frightened by the release of an 18-year-old man with whom a 14-year-old has had voluntary sex, whether or not that 14-year-old was a young man or a young woman.

    I guess you are. That’s the difference between me and you, I suppose.

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