Well, Governor Kelly – which is it?

CAMBRIDGE, MA - FEBRUARY 18: University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas smiles on the podium after winning the 200 yard freestyle during the 2022 Ivy League Women's Swimming and Diving Championships at Blodgett Pool on February 18, 2022 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo by Kathryn Riley/Getty Images)

Derek Schmidt has Governor Laura Kelly scrambling back and forth like a squirrel on a paved road trying to cover the tracks of her 2x veto of a law that would have protected women’s sports in Kansas from male competition. 

Kelly’s antics last week on the issue prove her vetoes are haunting her at election time the same way they still haunt Kansas’ women athletes. It turns out women in Kansas, just like women all over the country subject to the “woking” of their sports by ultra-Leftists who believe men can be women if they only say so, don’t appreciate being thrown under the bus by the elected leaders who should be protecting them.

No doubt Kelly’s flies on the wall at Schmidt’s recent campaign rally in Olathe with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis noted the rousing standing ovations Schmidt received – a number of times in fact – when doubling down on his promise to sign both the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and the Parents Bill of Rights. Kelly blocked them both with her veto pen in her term-long, lockstep curtsy to the woke mind virus that pervades modern Democrat public policy. So now, in Kansas, men who say they’re women can compete in girls sports both at the high school and college level, using their biological physical advantages to thieve honors and scholarships from girls. Likewise, the state still lacks a uniform standard that ensures parents the right to know of and challenge materials and activities in public schools in which their kids are forced to participate that parents find objectionable.

The response from that Olathe crowd and polls that show Kelly failing to gain position against Schmidt sent a shiver down the wobbly spines of Kelly’s liberal handlers. Their reaction was hasty, frantic and clumsy.

First Kelly deployed a hastily filmed reversal of her Fairness in Women’s Sports veto – conceding in the first moments that “Of course men should not play girls sports. Okay, we all agree there.” That 180 degree turn from her veto history was followed by the remainder of the video devoted to the campaign’s now tired refrain attempting to paint Schmidt with the Sam “Darth” Brownback brush. 

It’s a play Kelly’s campaign copied straight from the Democrat playbook embraced by the House Plant in Chief Joe Biden – when you have no credits of your own to campaign on, run against the guy who’s already out of office. (You remember Sam Brownback – elected in 2010, when the average price of ground beef nationwide was something like $3.18 a pound?)

The guffaws were deafening from Republicans, whose majority in the Kansas Legislature voted twice to pass the Fairness Act and who fell just short of overriding Kelly’s 2x veto. But the most fearful reaction was from Kelly’s campaign, after the purple-haired, clothes pin-pierced, dudes in skirts arm of the Democrat Party got their knickers in a knot thinking Kelly was abandoning them on the trash heap of derelict issues just to try to claim a few moderate votes. Which, in reality, she was.

So quickly did they hustle Kelly to the comforting confines of the liberal Kansas City Star’s editorial board that it gave David Toland the idea to use Covid money to build a rocket train between Topeka and Kansas City. There, cuddled to the warm and nurturing breast of Midwest liberalism, Kelly told a befuddled gathering of Star editors her comments were intended to convey that adult men – those of the hairy-legged variety – should not be able to compete in, like, junior high girls volleyball or something. 

As if anybody, anywhere in the debate, had ever said that.

The tone of the Star’s report of the meeting conveyed the confusion. One could imagine the looks on those editors’ faces at Kelly’s explanation; like being cornered at a bar by a guy who swears the players on the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team are actually real pirates.

Like a girls 200 meter hurdle race, time is ticking toward the 2022 election finish line. Voters are awakening and paying attention not just to the disastrous state of the nation under Democrat control but also to wrongs that need to be righted in Kansas. Kelly’s frantic defense of her actions as Governor is stressing her and her campaign planners, and it shows.###

– Dane HIcks, is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.