I try to be upbeat about Kansas, because I have some wonderful progressive friends living there. And I mean, they elected a Democratic governor! But sometimes there's just nothing to do but ask, "What the hell IS the matter with Kansas?"
A story in today's Salon sent me out onto the Web looking for more details of a case I'd not previously heard anything about. I found what I was looking for on the website of the ACLU, in a bare-bones bulleted account that made me break out in a cold sweat just reading it:
- In February of 2000, Matthew (Limon) and another male teenager were both students at the same co-ed residential school for developmentally disabled youth in Miami County, Kansas. A week after Matthew’s 18th birthday, Matthew performed consensual oral sex on the other teenager, who was nearly 15 years old – three years, one month and a few days younger than Matthew.
- Kansas has a so-called “Romeo and Juliet” law (K.S.A. § 21-3522) that makes the penalty for statutory rape less severe when the case involves two teenagers. (....)
- Because the “Romeo and Juliet” law excludes gay people, Matthew was charged with criminal sodomy instead under K.S.A. § 21-3505(a)(2). (....)
- Matthew received a sentence of 206 months (17 years and two months) in prison, when a heterosexual teenager with the same record would serve a maximum of 15 months for the same offense. Unlike a heterosexual teenager, he also must register as a sex offender and undergo 60 months of post-release supervision.
Matthew's case was appealed on equal protection grounds all the way to the US Supreme Court, which vacated his sentence and sent it back to the Kansas courts, who ignored everything and convicted him all over again. The ACLU has appealed his case to the Kansas Supreme Court again, however, in over six months there has been no ruling. According to the ACLU:
Matthew Limon has now been in prison for a little less than five years, already three years and eight months longer than a heterosexual teenager would have served for the same offense. If he were heterosexual, he would have been released in May of 2001. He is not set to be released until April of 2017, when he will be 36 years old.
My question about what's the matter with Kansas was, of course, wholly rhetorical. I know very well what's the matter. And so does author and mom Ayelet Waldman in the Salon article that sent me on my quest in the first place:
The case of Matthew Limon exemplifies the ugliness and brazenness of American homophobia, but while that may be the most important strand here, it's interwoven with adult discomfort with children's and teenagers' sexuality. The first strand is easy to untangle and resolve. The State of Kansas' justification for the horrifying disparity between its treatment of Matthew and that of his heterosexual counterparts comes down to this: Boys who get blow jobs from other boys are so impressionable that they might "turn gay." Apparently, all the social science research in the world pointing out that sexual orientation is innate, that evidence of it surfaces far before puberty, makes no impression on the wise lawmakers of Kansas.
I have no doubt there are plenty of good people in Kansas who know how wrong this is. (I'm trying and failing to resist the impulse to add the qualification "although listing them would not even tax my Typepad bandwidth allotment".) I don't drive a Volvo and I don't drink lattes but if this is a "traditional American value," the heartland is in even worse shape than I thought it was.
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