Kline: Consent laws at risk 09/16/03: Attorney General Phill Kline said Monday if the state loses a sodomy case currently before a state appeals court, state laws regarding marriage and sex with children will be nullified. Kline said the American Civil Liberties Union is attacking the state's prohibition of same-sex marriages, as well as laws against polygamy, incest, bestiality and sex between adults and children. An ACLU attorney said Kline had distorted the group's arguments and dismissed the statements as "an act of desperation."
The ACLU is representing Matthew Limon, convicted in 2000 of having sex at age 18 with a 14-year-old boy in Paola. Limon was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison, whereas the maximum sentence would have been one year and three months in prison had one of the teens been female. Kline characterized the ACLU's arguments in the case, now pending before the Kansas Court of Appeals, as a broad constitutional challenge to various Kansas laws, then attacked the organization for taking a position he defined as "absurd, flawed and wrong."
OK, I'm impressed. If our attorney general was seriously willing to make the argument, in public, that the state had the right to treat gays and lesbians differently because not doing so somehow leads to sex with children .... my goodness, I'd be terribly worried that we really had a very bad attorney general.
The state certainly has a compelling interest in protecting children from predatory adults. That is unargued. Nowhere did the Supreme Court or the ACLU argue that the state did not have the right to set an age of consent, below which teenagers are not considered competent to consent to have sex. (This, of course, will not stop them from actually doing so, but that's a separable issue.)
Kline cited a footnote in the ACLU's brief for Limon, in which it said teenagers have a well-established "liberty interest in being free from state compulsion" in making personal decisions about sex and marriage. [Kline said] "I'll tell you what: I would be deeply offended if, when my daughter turns 13, she walks out the door to meet her 30-year-old boyfriend, and I say 'no,' and she says, 'I've got a 1-800 number for the ACLU; it's my constitutional right,' " Kline said. "That's their argument. They have to live with it."
Well, I should think he might be deeply offended. He's also be an utter and absolute idiot. The age of consent in Kansas is 16. If his daughter is having a romantic relationship with a 30-year-old, he can simply report the man to the police, who will then arrest the man. The teenager may in fact have a well established liberty interest in being allowed to make decisions about her sex life ... but only above a certain age, and only certain decisions. The adult involved has no liberty interest whatsoever in being allowed to have sex with someone below the age of consent.
Really, Kline is quite the idiot.
In any event, I suspect that, given the direction they received from the US Supreme Court, the Kansas Supreme Court has no choice but to invalidate the differential sentence that Matthew Limon received. According to the state's laws, once you eliminate the difference between the sentences, which is the crux of the issue in this particular case, Kansas would still have been allowed to sentence Limon to jail time. Mind, he's already served more than the usual maximum for that type of sentence. A developmentally disabled teenager in an adult prison, for having sex with a male.
Well, yes. Quite.
Posted by iain at September 17, 2003 01:20 PMComments
