Unfortunately Anderson County residents who don’t think it’s right that men can take Kansas girls’ sports scholarships away from them won’t be any better represented after our move into the 9th District with state representative Kent Thompson of Iola.
Thompson joined three other Republicans in the House – one of them Anderson County’s infamous former state rep Mark Samsel – in supporting Governor Laura Kelly’s ongoing mission to keep Kansas women’s athletics open to men who say, like Shania Twain, that they really ‘feel like a woman.’
The garish visual of this abomination played out in recent weeks as a 6’1” male swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania, who now calls himself “Lia” Thomas, stole the NCAA 500 meter freestyle championship from Emma Weyant, a 5’8” competitor from University of Virginia. Weyant no doubt trained like a Spartan since she was in middle school for that moment and made innumerable personal sacrifices for it as all collegiate athletes do. But Kent Thompson and the rest of the nation’s aberrant sexual victimhood crowd are fine with taking Weyant’s honor away from her to make a man feel better about himself.
The Kansas bill, “The Fairness in Women’s Sport Act,” passed both houses of the legislature of course despite opposition from the likes of Thompson and Samsel, since the overwhelming majority of Kansas senators and representatives share the same basic gumption and sense of fair play as the rest of the state’s electorate.
As expected Kelly deftly followed the new Leftist mantra that demands the subjugation of women to whatever flavor-of-the month alternate sexuality is currently in vogue and vetoed the measure last Friday, just like she did a similar bill last year. Republicans now have to figure out if they can muster a ⅔ majority veto override. That most likely won’t happen, and the state will have to wait until Kelly cleans out her desk after the November election in order to save Kansas’ women athletes from the Left’s burgeoning queer culture.
But throwing Kansas’ women athletes under the bus isn’t the only Kent Thompson signature that should worry Anderson County voters and Kansans in general.
Thompson personally reaps the dividends of his support of the massive federally subsidized “green energy” fantasy culture Kansas wind “farms” invading more and more territory. The massive and ugly, property tax-exempt, 500-foot tall turbine fields amount to gigantic untaxed power plants covering hundreds of thousands of formerly pristine Kansas acres. The darkest humor about these government-funded atrocities is that they have to be hooked to firm “real” electricity to operate, because they only produce power when the wind blows. When they do, it is the most expensive electricity available anywhere on the planet, as former wind farm disciple European nations now choking for Russian petroleum and French nuclear generated electricity can attest. Nonetheless, Thompson pockets turbine lease payments, funded ultimately by generous federal taxpayer subsidies, from a number of these behemoths on his own property in Allen County.
His appetite for the mirage of federal subsidies even extends to his desire to lower the standards to allow 150,000 more Kansans onto the state’s Medicaid rolls. Expanding Medicaid – called KanCare in Kansas – would let able-bodied people onto the free medical plan who are 38 percent above the poverty line, many of whom already have healthcare coverage. It could cost the state as much as a billion new dollars, but by Thompson’s logic that’s a fair and sensible plan.
Because government money really doesn’t come out of your pocket, if you think like Kent Thompson. He voted in favor of the largest-ever tax increase in Kansas history back in 2017– some $3 billion heavily laid at the feet of working Kansas families – because he and other Republicans and Democrats refused to consider spending reductions in the face of sagging revenues. Those historic high taxes have been tapping Kansan’s wallets ever since. Now they’re generating surplus revenues; and talks on how to “give back” to Kansans what Thompson & company took from us in the beginning.
Whether on moral obligations like protecting women’s sports from male competitors or big subsidy fiscal notions that ignore Kansas’ conservative nature, Kent Thompson has proven he’s not a good fit for the 9th District – or for Kansas elected leadership.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.