The Red State Freak Show

Read this National Review article entitled The Red State Freak Show. The author, stationed in Europe, notes how over there abortion just isn't the big deal as it is in the U.S. and talks specifically about Kansas. In Europe, an area that most of consider to be very left-wing, there are basically no legal abortions after the first trimester. This was a law established by lawmakers--elected by the people--rather than imposed by the courts as we have here.

Some excerpts:

He describes Kansas, where "there are more restrictions on crappie fishing than there are on abortions; where one of the state’s most influential political donors is Dr. George Tiller, whose late-term clinic in Wichita has made Kansas notorious and Tiller rich; and where the state’s Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius, is so protective of abortion “rights” that she even vetoed a bill requiring routine inspections of health clinics, lest the inspection inconvenience abortion docs."

And...

In Kansas, voters are being treated to the spectacle of a former “moderate” GOP leader named Paul Morrison switching parties to run a Stowers-funded campaign for attorney general as a Democrat against the Republican incumbent, Phill Kline. Morrison’s big issues? They are two: Kline’s assumed opposition to embryonic stem cell research; and his insistence that abortion providers obey the law requiring them to file a report with authorities when doctors find evidence of child molestation. The state attorney general enforcing the law is something Morrison, with the help of the Kansas press, has painted as extreme. Meanwhile, Morrison and Sebelius are both staunch advocates of unrestricted abortions and unrestricted embryonic stem cell research, positions the local press describes as “moderate.” Their rivals, such as Jim Barnett, the mild-mannered Emporia physician and GOP gubernatorial candidate, are often portrayed as conservative flakes.

But if Kansas were in Europe, it would be a rogue state, isolated from others by the weirdness of its social policies.