Thread by @DanaHoule

Kansas has been at the center of abortion as a political issue from the beginning. It’s worth looking at Kansas’ history to grasp the momentousness of tonight’s victory for the right of women to control their bodies

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Go back to the beginning of Kansas. It was born in controversy. (Look up “Bleeding Kansas.”) It was founded in part by abolitionists from MA. It’s admission to the US was intertwined with the fight over slavery. This mural of the militant abolitionist John Brown… /2

…who ordered the execution of pro-slavery Kansans, is in the center of the Kansas state Capitol in Topeka. Bleeding Kansas was the prelude to the Civil War. SC Congressman Preston Brooks nearly caned MA Senator Charles Sumner to death over a speech Sumner gave called…/3

…speech Sumner gave about “the crime against Kansas.” During the Civil War Quantrill’s Raiders massacred about 150 people in abolitionist Lawrence KS. To this day Lawrence embraces its identity as the center of the “free state” movement. In to the 1970’s the KS Jayhawks…/4

…football coach, in the locker room before their yearly battle w the U of Missouri, would work his players in to a fervor by pointing to the black players and yelling something like “if they had their way you’d be SLAVES!”

This abolitionist, pro-union identity in Kansas…/5

…meant that the political identity was as deeply Republican as anywhere in the country

Fast forward to 1974.

In the year of Watergate the Republicans we’re in trouble. Especially the recent chair of the RNC, Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole. He faced a strong Dem…/6

…challenger, an MD & Congressman named William Roy. Dole might have lost that race. But he came up w an innovation crucial to the Republican Party for the next nearly 50 years

Bill Roy was an obstetrician. And in a handful of cases, to save the life of the woman…/7

…he had performed an abortion

In the immediate aftermath of Roe v Wade, Dole—one of the most ruthless & cynical American politicians of the last 100 years not named Mitch McConnell—saw an opening, &—with the help of the Catholic hierarchy in the state (this was before…/8

…evangelical Protestants had become politicized, w one of their core issues being opposition to abortion—Dole ran against Roy on Roe v Wade, & portrayed Roy as a baby-killer.

In a catastrophic year for Republicans, against a strong Democratic challenger, Bob Dole survived /9

…and Republicans saw a new cultural wedge issue

But here’s something weird about Kansas: most Kansas Republicans, like their New England Republican (and abolitionist) cousins, remained pro-choice. For a while, it was Kansas _Democrats_ who were more likely to be anti-choice /10

But over time the Repubs started to divide. The Kochs were based in Witchita, and they pushed the party in a nihilistically libertarian direction. And people like Sam Brownback—rumored to have attended Planned Parenthood events in the 1980’s—became fundie zealots

The Kansas…/11

…GOP split, and for a while Kansas was a three-party state:
1. Democrats
2. Moderate (primarily pro-choice & pro-public schools) Republicans
3. Reactionary anti-choice Koch zealot Repubs

In the aughts Kathleen Sibelius was able to exploit that divide, pick off moderate…/12

…Repub elected allies & moderate Repub voters, & win two elections for governor

But the Koch/fundie takeover of the GOP kept growing, & in 2010 Sam Brownback—only the second anti-choice Repub elected Gov of Senator since Roe v Wade—got the GOP nomination for Governor…/13

[Disclosure: I ran the campaign of his Democratic opponent.]

But Brownback got the nomination under a poisonous cloud: in 2009, while he attend services at his church, Wichita doctor & abortion provider Dr George Tiller was assassinated.

This is wher the Kansas GOP…/14

…beginning w Bob Doke’s scurrilous campaign against Dr Bill Roy had led, to the assassination of a doctor—at church—because he performed abortions

Nowhere in the country has the Republican Party traveled farther from its original embrace of human & civil rights to its…/15

…current embrace of reactionary hatred & suppression of basic rights protecting democracy, pluralism, & bodily autonomy

And tonight may have marked the end of the GOP destruction of basic rights. Kansans appear to have said “no more.” Some of that is surely college-…/16

…educated arrivals to Johnson County, the wealthy Kansas City suburb that now accounts for about a quarter of the Kansas vote.

But once we get detailed results we may see evidence that the old Kansas—the free-staters, the abolitionists, the decedents of the New England…/17

…Republicans—have had enough

When I worked in Kansas in 2010 one of our biggest challenges was convincing moderate Republicans who deluded themselves that it was all an act that he couldn’t be that whacked out, that Sam Brownback really was as bad as we said /18

Now it’s almost impossible, for anyone not intellectually & emotionally stunted, to think of themselves as reasonable & to also vote Republican

Tonight Kansas May have shown there are limits to the reactionary hatred & suppression that Americans will accept, that the GOP…/19

…& its political tools on the Supreme Court, have gone too far. That they will now pay a steep price for their reactionary policies & politics

God I hope so /20