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Ad Astra per Crappa

The blogresses at In This Moment, one our favorite leftist/progressive sites, alerted us to an interesting exchange on the floor of our state's House of Representatives.
The topic was whether state law should ban cities like Lawrence from enacting domestic partnership registry ordinances. The bill, HB 2299 (a .pdf version lives here) says:

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Kansas:
Section 1. No city or county shall enact any local legislation by the passage of an ordinance or resolution which creates a domestic partner registry or which otherwise establishes or recognizes any domestic partner relationship not recognized under state law.

What started this exercise was last year's decision by the Lawrence City Council to open a "Domestic Partner Registry", administered by the City Clerk for the benefit of residents of Lawrence. The City Clerk's web site tells us,

Registration creates no legal rights, other than the right to have the registered domestic partnership included in the City?s Domestic Partner Registry.

So, we're not sure what the point is, other than $75.00 a pop going in to the city's coffers. But the idea of unmarried couples in one town registering their relationships while people in other towns can't seems to rankle people on both sides of the debate:

On the issue of health benefits, [Rep. Lance] Kinzer [R-Olathe], said if couples are denied health insurance because they are unmarried, then they should get married.

That brought a sharp response from state Rep. Thomas ?Tim? Owens, R-Overland Park, who said, ?We are a nation of freedom, and I get real tired of hearing people try to shove down our throats how they believe that everybody else should act.?

The exchange was reported by the Lawrence Journal World in an item that lives here.
What troubles us about Mr. Owens's remarks is that, at some level all legislative enactments involve people shoving down other people's throats how they believe everybody else should act. Based on what he does for three months out of the year, and the history that our assembled Solons have of taking peoples' money and running their lives, his commitment to "freedom" is, well, obscure.
Apparently it doesn't occur to him that laws about vehicular homicide, bribing election officials and destination sales tax collection involve telling people how to behave just as much as House Bill 2299. The difference is, Mr. Owens' likes the idea of Lawrence's Domestic Partner Registry being shoved down the throats of the rest of Kansas. Just three days ago, Mr. Owens was voting in favor of the proposed coal-fired electric plant that Sunflower Electric wants to build outside Holcomb, which vote is arguably shoving the project down people's throats.
We take a minimalist approach to this kind of thing; the less the Legislature does, the more we like it. We do think that individual municipalities have no business writing laws that contravene the State Constitution. For lawyers and the unspeakably depraved, the relevant section reads:

§ 16: Marriage.

(a) The marriage contract is to be considered in law as a civil contract. Marriage shall be constituted by one man and one woman only. All other marriages are declared to be contrary to the public policy of this state and are void.

(b) No relationship, other than a marriage, shall be recognized by the state as entitling the parties to the rights or incidents of marriage.

The whole thing lives here, but you have to scroll down past §3, the part about how "Lotteries and the sale of lottery tickets are forever prohibited. " (Visitors outside of Kansas who miss the irony should look here. We'd pick 21, 19, 3 and 12.) That amendment passed with about 70% of the vote, which doesn't strike us as something that's been shoved down people's throats.
You can go blind from pointing out liberal hypocrisy and fecklessness, especially in our town this time of year. But it seems to us that when 70 % of the voters say, "Let it be done thus and so", it shouldn't be up to one town to say "We don't think so." Domestic Partner Registries may or may not be a good idea. What is a very bad idea is letting cities have the "freedom" to set themselves up in opposition to the Constitution.

Full post as published by West Neanderthal Drive on February 22, 2008 (boomark / email).