by Jack Cashill {WND.com}
With
her first appointment to the Kansas Supreme Court as governor in 2003,
Democrat Kathleen Sebelius chose the proudly “third-wave” feminist,
Carol Beier. It was a timely choice. That same year, Republican Phill
Kline took office as Kansas Attorney General. From Beier’s perspective,
Kline represented a serious threat to the “reproductive freedom” that
she, Sebelius, and other third-wavers espoused.
As Kline
sensed before taking office, the state’s two dominant abortion
providers, Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and
Mid-Missouri (CHPPKM) in suburban Kansas City and George Tiller’s
Women’s Health Care clinic in Wichita, were ignoring state restrictions
on late term abortion, Tiller flagrantly. What Kline discovered only
after a multi-year fight with Sebelius’s people to get access to
relevant records was that both clinics were grossly ignoring mandatory
reporting laws on child rape.
Of the 166 abortions
performed on girls under-fifteen in the years 2002 and 2003, the clinics
reported only three cases to the state department of Social and
Rehabilitation Services. They should have reported all 166.
Kline was prepared to press charges against both Tiller and CHPPKM. For reasons of ideology and campaign finance, Sebelius could not let this happen.
To begin, Sebelius persuaded Paul Morrison, a popular
Republican district attorney from Johnson County in suburban Kansas
City, to change parties and run against Kline in 2006. The state
abortion industry invested nearly $2 million to help the local media
defeat Kline.
To the dismay of the abortion industry,
however, Kline was elected to fulfill the remaining two years on
Morrison’s term as Johnson County DA. From that position, he was able to
continue the investigation into CHPPKM he had begun as attorney
general.
In October 2007, Kline filed 107 counts, 23 of
them felonies, against CHPPKM. District Court Judge James Vano found
“probable cause” of crimes having been committed and allowed the case to
proceed.
Planned Parenthood and new AG Morrison sued Kline to
derail the prosecution. When the case reached the Kansas Supreme
Court, the justices grudgingly ruled in Kline’s favor and allowed his
case against Planned Parenthood to go forward. If the facts supported
Kline, Judge Beier clearly did not. “His attitude and behavior are
inexcusable,” she wrote for the majority , “particularly for someone who
purports to be a professional prosecutor.”
Associated
Press writer John Hanna uncritically described her summary as “a public
tongue-lashing.” A Topeka reporter termed her opinion “a searing
condemnation.” The Kansas City Star headlined its story, “Kansas Court
Rebukes District Attorney Kline.” And remember, Kline won the case.
If
the media were blind to what was happening, then Kansas Supreme Court
Chief Justice, Kay McFarland, was not. She called Beier’s opinion “ the
very antithesis of ‘restraint and discretion’ and . . . not an
appropriate exercise of our inherent power.” McFarland scolded Beier
and the majority for attempting “to denigrate Kline for actions that it
cannot find to have been in violation of any law and to heap scorn upon
him for his attitude and behavior that does not rise to the level of
contempt.”
McFarland may have suspected that
Beier’s hectoring of Kline was not spontaneous. Earlier that year, in
fact, Beier co-authored a provocative paper that endorsed a strategy
very much like the one used to defame Kline. The paper was written for
the Feminist Legal Theory and Feminisms (sic) Conference sponsored by
the University of Baltimore School of Law and dealt with what is called
third-wave feminism and its effect on parenting law.
The article’s closing quote by Gloria Steinem captures the spirit of this radical feminist incarnation. “We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned,” said the feminist icon and all-purpose leftist. “We are really talking about humanism.” Understanding that tradition is not easily discarded in a state like Kansas, Beier and Walsh cite approvingly a strategy suggested by feminist law professor Bridget Crawford.
Write the authors,
“Crawford posits that the third-wave’s reclamation of feminism through
engagement with the media is powerful ‘cultural work’ that may be a
necessary pre-condition to an evolution in the law.”
According
to Crawford, “The media are tools to produce cultural infrastructure,
without which even the best intentioned and artfully designed legal
reforms are ineffective.” Beier knew something about the media. Before
going to law school, she worked several years for the Kansas City Times,
the then sister publication of the Kansas City Star.
The
Star proved to be the most useful of all media “tools” at Beier’s
disposal. Indeed, the paper won Planned Parenthood’s top 2006 national
editorial honor for its work defeating “anti-choice zealot” Kline and
attacked him relentlessly thereafter. So powerful was the media’s
“cultural work” that in May 2007 Sebelius had no qualms about letting
Planned Parenthood celebrate her birthday at a big Kansas City blow-out.
Leading
the “conga line around the concert hall” was Peter Brownlie, the local
CEO whose abortion clinic was then at the center of Kline’s
investigation. The partiers “sure know how to have fun!” enthused the
Planned Parenthood newsletter. With the cultural infrastructure so well
established, Kline lost his re-election bid and was forced to leave the
state to find employment.
Wanting to make an example of Kline
lest some other prosecutor challenge Planned Parenthood in the future,
the activists on the Supreme Court prompted an ethics investigation into
Kline’s handling of the abortion cases. Ironically, one of the charges
was that Kline did not share the scope of his investigation with
Sebelius. This was true. Kline feared her people would hamper the
investigation and possibly destroy evidence.
As it turned out, they did both. Planned Parenthood will likely escape prosecution because Sebelius’s health department and her attorney general’s office separately destroyed key evidence.
Last week, as the decision in the ethics case neared, Kline filed a
recusal motion showing that Beier’s 2008 opinion was “flagrantly
dishonest in its presentation of facts.” After reading Kline’s motion,
four other justices decided that they too had previously complained
about Kline’s behavior and recused themselves, as did Beier.
In
doing so, the justices gave Beier cover. A public airing of the
Beier-led assault on Kline would have seriously damaged the court’s
reputation and Sebelius’s. Planned Parenthood stood to lose over $300
million in federal funding if CHPPKM had been successfully prosecuted.
Sebelius protected Planned Parenthood’s interest in Kansas and now
oversees its funding as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The ladder goes up, Kathleen, but the circles go down.