If the apparent death throes of traditional marriage as a western political and social institution were not enough to draw your attention to the radical changes taking place in Americans' views of sexuality, parenthood, and the family, then let this story take center stage for a moment.
According to Denis Boyles at National Review Online, the Kansas Supreme Court appears to have reduced the treasured rhetoric of freedom of speech, public discourse, and the rule of law to a mask for the self-interested use of political influence. Boyles contends that justices on Kansas's highest court have broken precedent and, in some cases, compromised their integrity for the sake of protecting one of the state's largest Planned Parenthood chapters from scrutiny brought to bear upon it by Johnson County district attorney and former state attorney general Phill Kline. Some startling facts come to light in Boyles' reporting here: Supremely Wrong.
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The former state attorney general and current district attorney of Johnson County, in suburban Kansas City, Kline is that most unfortunate of political creatures — the inspired reformer. The object of his quixotic campaign is to reform the abortion laws of Kansas — not by changing them, but by simply enforcing them.
In a place like Kansas, you might think, that’s T-ball politics — but that would only be in the Kansas of popular (and Thomas Frank’s) imagination, where wily conservatives are winning the culture wars. They’re definitely not, as Kline now knows well. He started his mission after being elected attorney general in 2002. After six years, he has been so badly mangled by Kansas’s political machinery that he’s the one under siege. That’s his punishment for conducting a string of long and fruitful investigations that appear to show that the state’s largest abortion providers — including Johnson County’s Planned Parenthood clinic and George Tiller’s infamous late-term-abortion clinic in Wichita — have not only performed illegal abortions, they’ve also falsified documents as part of a cover-up.
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