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LGBT

Kansas Pastor: Killing Gay People Is Just Scripture

By Zack Ford on May 31, 2012 at 11:00 am

Kansas pastor Curtis Knapp is one of many far-right religious leaders under fire this week for preaching violent anti-gay rhetoric, telling his congregation at New Hope Baptist Church that homophobia is good because it keeps gay people in the closet, adding, “Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.” He defended his remarks yesterday on CNN:

KNAPP: We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things. It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption. In Leviticus 20:13, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act. They shall surely be put to death.” [...]

I don’t think homosexuals have anything to worry about. I don’t think the government’s going to do that. They don’t have anything to worry about from me. I don’t believe I should lay a finger against them. My hope is for their salvation, not for their death.

Watch it:

It’s good to know that gay people have “nothing to worry about” from a conservative pastor who openly advocates for their genocide.

Economy

Kansas Gov. Approves Massive Tax Cut For Rich That Even Some Republicans Opposed

By Travis Waldron on May 23, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) in January proposed a tax cut he said would give the state a “fairer, flatter, simpler” tax code, even though it raised taxes on the poor to help pay for a massive tax cut for the top one percent of state residents. Tuesday, Brownback signed an even bigger package into law, even as the state Senate’s top Republican and a host of other conservative lawmakers urged him not to.

The new package, largely backed by Tea Party-affiliated state legislators, abandoned some of Brownback’s proposals that would have hit the poor the hardest, though some still remain. But it will force lawmakers to make even deeper cuts to education and other programs to make up a growing budget gap, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The tax plan, which was the subject of weeks of intense debate and political maneuvering in the legislature, will reduce the top individual state income-tax rate to 4.9% from 6.45% in 2013. It also will eliminate income taxes on non-wage income for about 191,000 small businesses.

The plan likely would require additional cuts in spending on education and social services to cover a reduction in annual tax revenue projected by the Kansas Legislative Research Department to exceed $800 million by 2014, or 12.8% of projected state revenues.

“It is not good public policy,” state Sen. Steve Morris (R), the president of the state Senate, said of the legislation. Other Republicans agreed, including a group of 50 former Kansas Republican lawmakers who attempted to persuade Brownback to veto the bill. “I think Kansas taxpayers need to be asking where the governor would make these cuts,” said Rochelle Chronister, who formerly served as a state representative and as the president of the state GOP, said earlier this month.

Kansas’ tax code is already regressive, as the poorest 20 percent of Kansans paying more than 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay less than 6 percent of theirs. Now, it is even more regressive, and on top of that, poor and middle class Kansans will have to deal with spending cuts that hit social programs on which they depend.

Health

Pharmacists In Kansas Can Now Deny Women Access To Birth Control

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on May 16, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS)

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed a bill yesterday that will allow pharmacists in the state to refuse to fill a prescription they think could be used to induce abortion. But since the “conscience” measure says they cannot be required to provide a drug or devise that they think “may result in the termination of a pregnancy” — but does not define which drug in particular — the law’s opponents say it could allow a pharmacist to interfere with a woman’s health care by refusing to distribute birth control or emergency contraception.

Women who already have difficulty obtaining contraception may face additional hurdles, according to Julie Burkhart, founder of an abortion-rights group in Wichita, Kansas:

Burkhart said the law could create a hardship for women in small towns with a sole pharmacist who may refuse to fill certain prescriptions. In larger cities, women will have to make sure they go to a cooperative pharmacist, she added.

“Women should not have to go armed with a lot of research when looking for a physician or pharmacist in the community,” Burkhart said.

No pharmacist could be fired for refusing to fill such prescriptions, and doctors can refuse to refer patients to pharmacists who would fill a birth control prescription. Additionally, the Associated Press had reported that the law could “allow a doctor to refuse to provide chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient because it might end her pregnancy.”

Brownback’s office justified his signing by saying the bill “gives more legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions” based on their conscience. Kansas already had a law that allowed medical professionals to refuse to assist in abortion procedures.

While Kansas lawmakers failed to pass a sweeping anti-abortion bill that would have required doctors to give false information to their patients, the expanded “conscience” law is just one of several laws recently approved in the state that undermine women’s health and well being.

Justice

Kansas Legislature Passes Discriminatory Anti-Muslim Bill By Calling It A ‘Women’s Rights’ Issue

By Faiz Shakir on May 13, 2012 at 12:44 pm

Frank Gaffney warning of Sharia

Last week, the Kansas Senate became the latest state to enact a discriminatory measure against Muslims in America by passing a so-called Sharia ban. The bill goes before Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who has not indicated whethere he will sign or veto it.

Oklahoma passed a Sharia ban by ballot in 2010, but that measure has been deemed facially unconstitutional by the courts because it specifically targets Muslims for discrimination. Because of Oklahoma’s experience, state legislatures are moving bills that are more oblique about their discriminatory intent. South Dakota, Louisiana, Arizona, and Tennessee have all passed laws that ban “foreign law in American courts” and don’t mention Muslims or Sharia by name.

Kansas’ proposed anti-Muslim law also similarly asserts it is about promoting “American law for American courts.” (Note: the Constitution already establishes this in its Supremacy Clause.) As Kansas Republican state Sen. Chris Steineger noted, the measure was “presented” to him as a bill specifically targeting Muslims:

But Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said a marketing campaign by supporters of the bill inundated him with materials that “explain why sharia law is coming and Muslims are trying to take over America.”

“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time, and I still do,” Steineger said. “I pointed this out, because this was not presented as protecting the Kansas Constitution. The proponents of this measure, clearly by the literature they gave me and by the video link they directed me to, they presented this as protecting us against sharia law. Despite the fact that this doesn’t mention sharia, that’s how this whole issue was presented.”

Indeed, Kansas was bombarded by anti-Sharia emails and letters from out-of-staters. The bill’s sponsors and advocates proclaimed that it was really about protecting “women’s rights.” The bill helps “women know the rights they have in America,” said sate Rep. Peggy Mast (R). “To me, this is a women’s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle (R). Nevermind that these same legislators have been engaged in a war against women’s health, Planned Parenthood, the right to choose, and so many other far more relevant “women’s rights” causes.

Right-wing legislators have been pushing Sharia bans across the country; roughly 20 other states are also considering similar legislation. The anti-Sharia legislative movement was spawned by David Yerushalmi, an influential Islamophobic lawyer who we profiled last year in Fear, Inc.

The anti-Sharia movement continues despite the fact that no evidence has been provided that there is any threat that a Sharia takeover is occurring. Kansas Republican state Sen. John Vratil “said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.” As Vratil asserted, “Ladies and gentleman, this is a solution in search of a problem.” True, unless you are someone who views the increasing presence of Muslims in America as the problem.

Health

Kansas Senate Stops Anti-Abortion Bill That Would Have Required Doctors To Give False Information

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on May 11, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Kansas Senate President Steve Morris (R) effectively killed an anti-abortion bill by sending it back to a Senate committee that is unlikely to bring it up for a vote before the legislative session ends today. “It is prudent for the Senate to have more time to consider the proposal,” he said.

In a last-ditch effort, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lance Kinzer (R) said the bill’s supporters are trying to pull the bill from committee onto the floor, but they would need 24 votes in the 40-member Senate and it is unclear if they would succeed.

The far-reaching legislation, which the House had passed and governor had promised to sign, would have defined a fetus as a human being, required women to hear the fetal heartbeat prior to undergoing an abortion, forced doctors to warn women that abortions cause breast cancer — even though scientific studies have disputed the claim. Morris said he was concerned about a provision in the 69-page bill that would have affected the accreditation of the University of Kansas Medical Center because it would have banned state employees, including residents who need the training, from performing abortions.

NEWS FLASH

Kansas Spending $628K Defending Radical Anti-Abortion Laws | The Kansas attorney general has spent close to $628,000 defending anti-abortion laws the state enacted last year, the Associated Press reports. The attorney general’s office paid $327,000 to a private firm for “helping defend a budget provision denying federal family planning dollars for non-abortion services to Planned Parenthood,” spent almost $193,000 on a law imposing new restrictions on abortion providers and expensed $107,000 in tax payer dollars to defend “against a law restricting private insurance coverage for elective abortions.” Kansas faced a $493 million budget shortfall last year and to close the deficit, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) proposed $50 million in cuts to education programs. The state is pursuing new radical anti-abortion legislation.

Health

Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill Would Force Doctors To Warn Women Of False Cancer Risk

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on May 4, 2012 at 3:16 pm

The Kansas House is considering HB 2598, a 69-page, extreme anti-abortion bill that would force doctors to warn women that abortions cause breast cancer — even though scientific studies have disputed the claim — define a fetus as a human being, and require women to hear the fetal heartbeat prior to undergoing an abortion. In February, before a House committee approved the bill, a Planned Parenthood of Kansas official described it as “the largest and most sweeping overhaul we’ve seen to date.”

But in a state where the attorney general has already spent more than half a million dollars defending an anti-abortion law that severely limits the availability of insurance coverage for abortions, this bill is just one more harmful restriction on abortion services that state lawmakers have added:

– EXPANDED ‘CONSCIENCE MEASURE: Earlier this week, the state Senate aproved a bill that offers additional legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions. The House had already approved the measure, and it is likely that Gov. Sam Brownback (R) will sign it. But critics of the bill worry the “conscience” measure goes too far, and that it would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control “allow a doctor to refuse to provide chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient because it might end her pregnancy,” according to the Associated Press.

– PREVENTING LICENSES FOR PROVIDERS: Last year, the legislature approved licensing regulations that specifically targeted the state’s three abortion providers, potentially making Kansas the first state where a woman could not access abortion services. But when a judge temporarily blocked the regulations from going into effect, Brownback’s administration planned to enact the exact same regulations to skirt around the court’s ruling.

– DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD: Lawmakers signed off on a law last year to ban Planned Parenthood clinics in Kansas from receiving federal funds, endangering health care for at least 5,700 patients. A judge blocked the law from going into effect, but the state has spent hundreds of thousands continuing to defend the law.

And each of these overreaching regulations are in addition to other measures, like preventing abortions after 20 weeks and requiring women to wait 24 hours before an abortion procedure. By limiting women’s access to abortion services — and potentially other forms of care — Kansas is is denying women choice and undermining their health.

Update

The Kansas House passed HB 2598 Friday afternoon. The sweeping anti-abortion measure now heads to the state Senate for consideration. If it reaches the governor’s desk, Brownback has promised to sign it.

Economy

Former Republican Lawmakers Push Kansas Governor To Abandon Proposal To Cut Taxes For The Rich

By Travis Waldron on May 2, 2012 at 4:10 pm

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) proposed a tax plan in January that he said would make the state’s tax code “fairer, flatter, simpler” by lowering tax rates for all Kansans. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, Brownback’s plan actually cut taxes for the state’s top 1 percent while raising them on the lower and middle classes.

Facing criticism from policy analysts and lawmakers, Brownback’s plan hung up in the state legislature, where lawmakers have been working to hammer out a compromise plan. Now, however, a group of 50 former Republican lawmakers is calling on Brownback to abandon the plan because it would blow a massive hole in the state budget, jeopardizing schools, roads, and other important programs, the Lawrence Journal-World reports:

Traditional Republicans for Common Sense said the tax bill, if enacted, would put the state in a budget hole that would result in cuts to essential services, such as schools, roads, and nursing home care. The group said it would also lead to increases in local property taxes.

“I think Kansas taxpayers need to be asking where the governor would make these cuts,” said Rochelle Chronister, former assistant majority leader in the House, and former chair of the Kansas Republican Party.

“More importantly, we need to be asking what cuts of this magnitude might look like for working families, retirees and Kansas children,” Chronister, of Neodesha, said.

Original analysis of Brownback’s plan found that it would cost the state $900 million by 2018. A new analysis, released recently, said it would cost only $160 million by 2018, though that plan is based on growth projections in state sales tax revenues that are largely unrealistic.

Brownback has not said how he would make up the lost revenue, instead adhering to the false Republican orthodoxy that the tax cuts wouldn’t affect the budget because they would create jobs and boost economic growth.

Climate Progress

Government Saves Countless Lives From Tornadoes In Koch And Inhofe Country

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Our guest blogger is Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

Countless lives were saved this weekend by vigilant government officials who warned of deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska — states whose politics are dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues. Over 100 tornadoes struck down in 24 hours, but only six people died in Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s home state, thanks to warnings from the National Weather Service scientists he has worked to discredit:

The tornadoes were unrelenting – more than 100 in 24 hours over a stretch of the Plains states. They tossed vehicles and ripped through homes. They drove families to their basements and whipped debris across small towns throughout the Midwest. In some areas, baseball-size hail rained from the sky.

And yet, in a stroke that some officials have attributed to a more vigilant and persistent warning system, relatively few people were killed or injured.

Wichita, Kansas, the headquarters of Koch Industries, suffered $280 million in damage from a ferocious twister, but the “ever-increasing government” demonized by the Koch brothers prevented any loss of life.

Greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuel industries that control the region’s politics is making our weather more extreme and dangerous. The heat trapped by carbon pollution is powering these earlier and more intense storms with record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday:

This is the warmest March value on record for the Gulf of Mexico, going back over a century of record keeping. During the first two weeks of April, Gulf of Mexico waters remained about 1.5°C above average, putting April on pace to have the warmest April water temperatures on record. Only one year in the past century has had April water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1.1°C above average; that year was 2002 (1.4°C above average.) All that record-warm water is capable of putting record amounts of water vapor into the air, since evaporation increases when water is warmer. Because moist air is less dense than dry air, this warm, moist air flowing northwards from the Gulf of Mexico into the developing storm system over the Plains will be highly unstable once it encounters cold, dry air aloft. The record-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are a key reason for the high risk of severe weather over the Plains this weekend.

Related Post:

Justice

Kansas State Senators Flooded With Out-Of-State Anti-Sharia Emails

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 16, 2012 at 3:00 pm

Anti-Muslim Activist Frank Gaffney

More than twenty state legislatures are considering bills that ostensibly prohibit judges from following foreign law, but which are actually part of a nationwide Islamophobic campaign to combat the nonexistent problem of American courts relying on Sharia law. As the Topeka Capital-Journal explains, however, this effort has been much less effective in convincing Kansas lawmakers’ actual constituents to support an anti-Muslim bill than it has been in simply harassing those lawmakers with out-of-state emails:

“I had a large number of emails — like in the thousands — during the last couple weeks of session (before the current break),” said Sen. Jeff King, R-Independence.

King said he had to instruct his assistant to funnel them into a separate folder and further separate the emails that actually came from his constituents, which he said narrowed the number to “dozens.”

Sen. Tim Owens, R-Overland Park, recently said his inbox also was full of anti-Sharia emails, most of them from out-of-state.

It’s really no surprise that there aren’t many actual Kansans worried about the threat of creeping Sharia. As ThinkProgress previously explained, a judge is about as likely to replace American law with “the laws of ancient Rome or the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons second edition rules” as they are to suddenly decide to embrace Sharia law.

Yet, while the anti-Sharia bills being pushed by national Islamophobes are completely unnecessary, that does not mean that they are harmless. Initially, anti-Muslim activists pushed bills and ballot initiatives that expressly forbade the courts from applying Islamic law in any circumstance. This kind of law is unambiguously unconstitutional, and it fared poorly in federal court. So the latest round of anti-Sharia bills have removed expressed references to Sharia or Islam, and they have expanded their scope to include bans on other foreign law.

These bans, however, can have serious consequences for a state’s businesses and for non-Muslim residents. Businesses frequently contract with foreign companies to resolve their disputes according to foreign law, which is why business groups came out against a Virginia anti-Sharia bill to prevent it from hurting their ability to do business overseas. Similarly, a Florida anti-Sharia bill’s overbroad language likely would have prevented Florida courts from enforcing many Orthodox Jewish divorces.

And for all the anti-Muslim lobby’s effort’s to save their pet bills from unconstitutionality by not being entirely candid about what these bills are intended to accomplish, their efforts are likely to amount to nothing. As the Supreme Court held in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, the Constitution forbids laws that “regulate[] or prohibit[] conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons” — even if the law banning religious conduct is written without referencing a particular faith.

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