Quit your whining, Governor Kelly is saying to the women of Kansas.
Quit pretending you deserve a chance to win in athletic competitions just because you followed the rules, pushed yourself to the limit in workouts for years, spent hours and hours and hours on the track or court or ballfield or in the Olympic pool honing your skills and developing your talent.
Stop acting like earning a win means something. Because the governor of your state is telling you if a man wants it in order to make him feel better about himself, he’s more entitled to your win than you are.
Quit being so selfish expecting that your work and sacrifice and dedication are more important than some man who wants to invade your sport to take your first place finish – and second and third for that matter – if enough men need to have their self esteem boosted by beating you.
After all, if a man with his accepted physical advantages in strength, speed and leverage wants it, you don’t deserve to win – at least according to Governor Laura Kelly, 5th District Representative Mark Samsel and the Kansas National Education Association. They’re all fighting to give men the right to move in to your sport and take your trophy, your scholarship, maybe even your future.
That message was loud and clear last week when Kelly vetoed the Protection of Women’s Sports Act, a bill which if signed into law would have prohibited biological men from competing in women’s high school and college sports in Kansas.
Indeed, after spending the entire past year hectoring the rest of us to “follow the science,” and then defaming anyone who questioned mask mandates or business shutdowns or school cancellations or banned church services as “science deniers,” the governor now says it’s okay for science to be fluid when presented in the right political light. Now, according to Kelly, Samsel and the KNEA, “follow the science” is a concept that falls short of human biology – if it’s couched the right way by one’s Leftist political cronies.
The veto from Kelly came as no surprise. Her coddling favoritism for the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transexual-Queer special interest group goes back to her days in the statehouse and the earliest hours of her administration. Her deep footings in the liberal agenda were ignored during her first campaign for governor, but she was a less bitter pill to swallow than Kris Kobach for many Johnson County Republicans who gave her the winning margin. One has to wonder how many of those Kelly-voting JOCO GOP households have daughters who may have to run the 400 meter this season against “Roberta” who used to be “Robert?”
While Kelly’s at least honest in the corrupt values that make it easy for her to throw women athletes under the bus to make Kansas “welcoming” to families with transgender children, Samsel’s cowardice in his sell-out of women is more shrouded. He dances around claims that lawsuits (oh no!) might stem from the legislation, then scurries away from the bill’s moral rightness with warnings that Kansas might lose business or jobs or NCAA tournament games – as if those potential costs somehow trump the solidarity with which Kansas is obliged to stand alongside its thousands of female competitors.
KNEA’s attack on female athletes is far easier to understand. Burgeoning with university minted liberals and its own leadership taking its marching orders from the communist-inspired Saul Alinsky reading list recommended by the comrades at the National Education Association, KNEA and its socialist elites yearn for the day– to paraphrase George Orwell – that all the animals are equal, as long as some remain more equal than others.
Kansas women athletes should feel more than just abandoned and marginalized by the governor and the likes of Samsel and other legislators who’ve acted to steal the prize they’ve worked for. They are right in feeling angry. They are right in making their feelings known. Yet they risk the torrent of liberal cancel culture attack from the extremist Left which follows any act of protest to today’s woke culture.
Kelly, Samsel and others expect women athletes and their families to just shut up and take it. They’ve treated their fellow Kansans despicably, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kansas.