TOPEKA — The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas is prepared to challenge the Kansas Legislature’s annual attacks on transgender children, voting rights and reproductive health care while searching for common ground on criminal justice reform and medical marijuana.
The organization’s priorities for the 2023 session are mostly at odds with leadership in the GOP-dominated House and Senate. One of the first bills that was introduced this year would ban gender-affirming care before the age of 21, and there is talk of banning drop boxes or tightening the early voting period. Republicans also made it clear they will respond to last year’s rejection of a constitutional amendment on abortion by testing the limits of protections installed by the Kansas Supreme Court in 2019.
Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, talked about the organization’s plans during a recording of the Kansas Reflector podcast.
“Democracy itself is being challenged in the country right now,” Kubic said. “And democracy means not just voting rights, but is really an idea — the idea that everyone counts, that everyone matters, that everyone is part of the community, that everyone is part of a social compact together.”
Voting rights
Kansas has been on the front lines of the battle over voting rights for years, as former Secretary of State Kris Kobach promoted false claims of mass voter fraud.
The ACLU of Kansas in 2018 helped defeat his signature law, which required new voters to produce a birth certificate before registering to vote. Kobach took office last week as the state’s new attorney general.
The current secretary of state, Scott Schwab, defeated an election denier in the Republican primary and openly rejected conspiracy theories about the integrity of elections. Kubic said Schwab deserves credit for taking his job seriously, but lawmakers who think the 2020 presidential election was stolen are still eager for change.
“The folks who have been most vigorous on this issue and trying to push for unnecessary, ineffective and, frankly, wrong restrictions have already signaled that they’re going to do the same again this year,” Kubic said. “Whether they get a broader hearing from other members of the Legislature who are not as deeply embroiled in those conspiracies and misinformation? We’ll see.”
Kubic said the ACLU of Kansas believes democracy is strongest when more people participate.
“All of the attacks on voting rights are really designed to make it harder for particular groups of people — usually communities of color, lower-income communities, younger people especially — to participate in democracy,” Kubic said. “We’ve certainly seen over the last 20 years a sustained, concerted, deeply dishonest, deeply disingenuous campaign to attack the right to vote.”
LGBTQ rights
Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed model legislation passed in 2021 and 2022 that would have banned transgender athletes from participating in school sports.
The Legislature is expected to pass the same law again this year, with the hope that a more conservative House will be able to override the governor’s veto.
Additionally, Sen. Mike Thompson, R-Shawnee, and Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson, cosponsored Senate Bill 12, model legislation that prohibits and punishes “gender reassignment service” under the pretense of “child mutilation prevention.”
