Kansans Come Through

Given the opportunity to exercise real democracy, the people of Kansas overwhelmingly came out to vote for women's reproductive rights.

Let us not doubt the plain spoken wisdom of Middle-Westerners. Sure, there’s crazy Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, or the remarkable cowardice of Missouri’s Josh Hawley (last seen in the ridiculously too-tight suit raising his fist in salute to the riotous January 6th crowd just before he was seen on video running for his life from them), or the various armchair chickenhawks who avoided military service, but are willing to send our troops anywhere, anytime. But for all of them—and this is sometimes hard to remember—there is a huge vein of common sense there.

“What’s the Matter with Kansas?”  was the title of a popular Thomas Frank book from the mid-2000’s, wherein we learned that Kansans (not unlike many other Americans) could be snookered. They had a tendency to vote against their economic self-interests by following politicians like senator-cum-governor Sam Brownback down the path to culture war. Said politicians convinced conservative voters that killing public school funding, passing tax reform that protected the rich at the expense of the middle class, fighting against abortion rights, gay marriage, and the laundry list of other cultural hot buttons of the time, was more important than their economic well-being.

It has been classic bait-and-switch in the Heartland. The fantasy battle cry was, “Vote for me and we’ll drown the libs and their California sensibilities.” The reality was, once in office, they did little more than feather their own nests.

In hopes of achieving victory last week, they tried every dirty play in the book. They began by scheduling the referendum on abortion rights on a ho-hum midterm where voters are as spare as palm trees in Wichita, and only diehard conservatives tend to show up. Then they spun up misleading referendum language geared to make voters think a “yes” vote protected the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion when the opposite was true. Next, they ran ads promoting the same misleading claim. Finally, on election eve, they made robocalls reinforcing the lie.

To their shock, none of their tried and true tactics worked, and Kansans showed up in droves to overwhelmingly vote “no,” leaving their constitution untouched because while reliably conservative, Kansas is also relentlessly practical. Call it the Ethos of the Prairie. 

“Anti-abortion zealots thought that if they gamed the Supreme Court and gerrymandered state legislatures, they could impose their regressive views on the majority of voters,” said state Rep. Josh McLaurin. “But Kansas proves that when you underestimate democracy, you lose.”

In the end, it was Dorothy 1 – Wicked Witch 0.

Elsewhere, the radical right seems to want nothing less than a rapists’ bill of rights. Indiana’s Attorney General shouted his desire to investigate the Ob-Gyn who (legally) prescribed abortion pills to the Ohio 10 year-old who had been impregnated by her uncle and had to flee that state to get treatment. The woman who is now the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan pointed to the case of a 14-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle, saying that that was the perfect case to prove exactly why there should be no exceptions for rape or incest to laws that ban abortion. Huh?

We currently have a lot of people in power who care little for what we think. I have long said that the desire to run for President of the United States should be an automatic disqualifier. I’m now wondering if we should draft every single elected official based on their wisdom, experience and previous meritorious service to the nation or their community. Most of those good folks would resist, kicking and screaming all the way to DC.

There is important abortion action on other fronts. The courts are getting stuffed with suits seeking to stop religious radicals from imposing their views on the rest of us.

A rabbi in Florida has sued that state on the premise that certain Judaic traditions hold that abortion is appropriate, even necessary at times. Other Torah interpretations say the fetus is not a child until God breathes life into it. (My grandmother didn’t think your life was viable until you graduated from medical school, and a good one at that.)

Lessons? Don’t mess with our women-folk; you may have packed the courts and congress with self-identified Christian Nationalists, but they have never spoken for most Christians; while you wield significant minority power today to do whatever undemocratic things you want, elections have consequences. The biggest lessons are keep the church and state separate, and allow the majority opinion to prevail in our constitutional democratic republic.

Americans are pretty steady. We have level heads and an eye for the practical and the obvious. Where we go wrong is allowing power-hungry ego maniacs to get into office and then burden the rest of us with their extreme ideologies.

©2022 Jon Sinton