Mother Davis looks over the edge of a canyon cliff as she reflects,

In one of the more thoughtful questions asked last year, author Thomas Frank wrote a book around the exploration of What’s the Matter With Kansas?. Frank’s subject was really an attempt to understand why the working families of Kansas are voting against their economic self-interest by voting for Republican politicians. These Republican politicians push through special tax breaks for the extremely wealthy even as they cut support for programs that help working families who are struggling to make ends meet.

Frank’s explanation of this irrational voting pattern is that Republican politicians have managed to convince Kansas voters that it’s more important to vote in favor of a right wing cultural agenda than to vote for their economic self-interest. So, Kansas voters put Republican politicians in public office who give huge favors to corporate interests that drain the Kansas economy, and do so because those politicians promise to ban abortion, push Christianity in public school classrooms, and pass legislation that enshrines right wing religious values in the law.

Thomas Frank’s hypothesis has been supported in spades this spring. For one thing, the entire world has watched as the Kansas Board of Education held a modern-day version of the Scopes Monkey Trial - a crude set of hearings rigged to push Intelligent Design Theology, the latest incarnation of Creationism, into high school science classrooms. It’s a repetition of a similar theocratic song and dance a few years ago that gave Kansas an international reputation as an out-of-touch backwater that favored medieval values over the value of a good education. (It’s enough to make one wonder how the Kansas fundamentalists would feel if scientists all of a sudden began a campaign to require churches to teach evolution theology.) The Kansas Board of Education, dominated by right wing politicians, seems set to approve the introduction of the religious principles of Intelligent Design Theology into public high schools this summer, in spite of the well-demonstrated lack of scientific validity of the Intelligent Design curriculum.

One could easily conclude that right wing activists are trying to take Kansas culture back to the early 1800s, before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their theories of natural selection. This conclusion is supported by the candidacy of Kay O’Connor for the office of Kansas Secretary of State. O’Connor showed her appreciation of 19th century values when she declared, “I think the 19th Amendment, while it’s not an evil in and of itself, is a symptom of something I don’t approve of … I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family.”

The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the history of liberty in the United States, is the amendment that gave women the right to vote. So, Ms. O’Connor was saying, in effect, that she doesn’t approve of women voting, and believes that women being given the right to vote is a symptom of a larger evil. That’s a special concern now that O’Connor is running for Secretary of State, because the Secretary of State oversees public elections in Kansas.

Are the people of Kansas really yearning for the good old days when women couldn’t vote and everybody believed that the Earth was just six thousand years old? It’s worth remembering what else was going on in Kansas in the time before biological evolution and women’s suffrage came into being. Settlers favoring traditional American values were flooding into Kansas to wage a real culture war, killing Kansas residents who favored the abolition of slavery so that, when the time came for a vote, Kansas could keep its black people in chains.

What’s the matter with Kansas? Kansas appears to be rushing toward the edge of enlightenment and liberty, to hurtle off into the deep end of America’s darkest history. That’s bad enough for the people of Kansas, but what really frightens me is that the Republican Party’s leaders want to do for America what they’ve done for Kansas.

Hoping for a return to the 21st century,
Mother Davis