Kline, ACLU Dispute Marriage, Consent Laws
Associated Press, September 15, 2003
http://www.cjonline.com/stories/091503/bre_kline.shtml
By John Hanna
Attorney General Phill Kline said today that if the state
loses a sodomy case currently before a state appeals court, Kansas marriage
laws and laws against sex with children will be nullified.
Kline said the American Civil Liberties Union is
attacking the state’s prohibition of same-sex marriages as well as laws
against polygamy, incest, bestiality and sex between adults and children. An
ACLU attorney said Kline had distorted the group’s arguments and dismissed
his statements as “an act of desperation.”
The ACLU is representing Matthew Limon, convicted in 2000
of having sex at age 18 with a 14-year-old boy when both were residents of a
Paola group home for the developmentally disabled.
Limon was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison for
violating the state’s anti-sodomy law, having two similar offenses on his
juvenile record. However, had he or the other teen been female, a prosecutor
would have had the option of filing the lesser charge of unlawful sexual
relations, for which his maximum sentence would have been one year and three
months in prison.
Kline characterized the ACLU’s arguments in the case,
now pending before the Kansas Court of Appeals, as a broad constitutional
challenge to various Kansas laws and then attacked the organization for taking
a position he defined as “absurd, flawed and wrong.”
“The argument in the ACLU brief is a direct assault on
the institution of marriage and also various criminal laws that protect
children from sexual exploitation by adults,” Kline said during a news
conference.
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