What's Up With Kansas? How the Right Wing Lost Control of the Cyclone State

This article originally appeared in Ms. Magazine.

Election 2006 was properly reported as a Democratic landslide that changed control of the U.S. senate and the House of Representatives. But most reporters and pundits missed a story on one of the most profound turnarounds delivered by voters in over a decade: in Kansas, a place that has been called "The Reddest of Red States", there was nothing short of a progressive revolution. And that's good news for women and the issues they care about. To start with, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was re-elected with 58 percent of the vote -- against an anti-abortion Republican bent on abolishing the estate tax -- although less than a third of Kansas voters are registered Democrats. Sebelius' lieutenant governor, Mark Parkinson, even switched parties to run on her pro-choice platform, despite being the former head of the state Republican Party.

Two other Kansas Republicans who switched parties were elected to the state House, cutting into the dominance of Republicans in the state legislature. And pro-choice Kansans were relieved to see Phill Kline, an out-of-control anti-abortion zealot, turned out of the attorney general's office with a 58 percent vote for his opponent, Paul Morrison -- an abortion-rights supporter and yet another former Republican.

Moderates both Democratic and Republican ended conservative control of the Kansas Board of Education, banishing two members who had crusaded to replace evolution with creationism in the public schools -- and the new board reversed their decision soon after taking office. Finally, in a U.S. House race, pro-choice underdog Nancy Boyda ran on a progressive economic platform to defeat five-term incumbent Republican Jim Ryun.

So what's up with Kansas? It just so happens I know a little something about the place. Shortly after I came from Texas to Wichita in early 1986 to take a job, an abortion clinic owned by Dr. George Tiller was bombed. Feminists came together to "fight the right" and, through the local NOW chapter, we created an escort service for women entering Tiller's Women's Health Care Services -- one of the few places in the country where women can obtain late-term abortions.

Despite the bombing, Kansas was not yet the conservative bastion it became in the 1990s. Traditional moderate Republicans controlled the state legislature, Wichita's member of the House, Dan Glickman, was a pro-choice Democrat, and Republican pro-choice moderate Nancy Kassebaum was in the Senate. There was a Democratic governor in the statehouse as well.

But the bombing was one of several signs that things were changing. By 1988, as president of Wichita NOW and leader of the opposition to growing threats to women, I was concerned enough about anti-choice zealotry to watch my back every time I went out. The right wing of the Republican Party started to take over at the precinct level all over the state, and conservatives began running for school boards and pushing for "intelligent design" curriculum in science classrooms.

In 1991, a year after I left Kansas, the right wing of the state's Republican party had gained a lot of momentum. Operation Rescue targeted Tiller's Women's Health Care Services for its "Summer of Mercy," in which thousands of anti-abortion troops came to Wichita to lie in the streets and illegally block the clinics, filling the jails. Their actions culminated in an anti-abortion rally that drew 25,000 to Wichita State University's stadium.

Over the next decade, the conservative juggernaut rolled on. Mirroring races all over the country in the 1994 "Republican Revolution," Glickman was defeated by right-wing standard-bearer Todd Tiahrt, and a little-known politician named Sam Brownback was elected to his first term in the House. In 2002, Phill Kline, a Kansas City radio host and Rush Limbaugh clone, was elected attorney general, and immediately tried to force Kansas health workers to report sexual activity of girls younger than 16 (the Kansas age of consent). That action was blocked by a federal judge, but by 2004 Kline had convinced a county district judge to issue subpoenas for records of 90 women from two abortion clinics -- names, sexual history, medical details -- describing it as a search for evidence of illegal late-term abortions and child rape.