The Church and State series from Kansas reflector editor Sherman Smith and reporter Rachael Mipro examined at the intersection of faith and politics in Topeka. The six part series along with a couple of follow up columns from yours truly gathered notice across Kansas and beyond. Sherman and Rachel, join me today on the Kansas reflect her podcast to talk about the series and its aftermath. Sherman and Rachel, glad you're here.
We're happy to be here. Clay,
great to be here.
So Sherman, let's let's start with you, as some of this kind of was was your vision talk about how this series came together?
Yeah, well, clay for the readers benefits. You and I and some of the other staff have engaged in a number of townhall appearances throughout the session. Earlier this year, we went to small towns all over Kansas, hearing directly from people about what what they're interested in their questions about what the legislature is up to. And sometime in March, we went out to Hutchison for one of these. And we made some friends out there. And I came back to Topeka with this audio recording from a meeting of Reno county Republicans in early March, where the keynote speaker was a guy named Adam Peters. He's the GOP chairman for Ellis County. And right away, I think I looked at this and thought, there's some interesting things being said here. And I think I showed it to you, I don't know if you remember your first reaction.
It was it was pretty remarkable. It's a remarkable audio document. Or I mean, even if you see a transcription of it, just to see how wide ranging it is, how many topics they cover, and then just kind of how deeply conspiratorial an audit gets at times.
And it's about an hour and 45 minutes long. And it goes off in various kind of tangents throughout, it's, you know, a lot to wrap your mind around. And this is at a time when the legislature was preparing for, I think, the final week of the the regular part of the legislative session. And so we couldn't really take time to focus on it, then. But then there's this three week period before they come back at the end of the session. And so there was a day where I met with Rachel, and I think you were there at a coffee shop and Lawrence and sat down and kind of thought about what we could do with this audio. And I thought, you know, it doesn't really make sense now to write about a disturbing conversation that happened six weeks ago. And I thought instead of saying, Here's a story about this audio recording, we could do this as a way of kind of recapping what the legislature had been up to. And there's this theme, I think, throughout the legislative session, but also really, throughout that recording, of sincerely held religious beliefs, justifying ideas that are really not popular, and sometimes don't even have any other justification for why we would do this the state policy. You know, in this recording at times, they say, you know, very explicitly God is on our side. And, you know, they're protecting their churches, they're trying to do the Lord's work. And then it corresponds very neatly with a bunch of stories or a bunch of policies that the legislature had enacted throughout the session. And so, you know, I have this little legal pad in the office with a makeshift outline that we sketched out where I thought, you know, we could have an opening day story that says, here's, here's what they said in the audio, they're interested in forming a conservative sanctuary for Kansas. And they have some interesting ideas about how to do that. But then we can focus specifically on these big picture issues of the LGBTQ community attacks on women's reproductive health, public schools, and issues surrounding race, you know, there's a biblical explanation for why race doesn't exist during this, this audio recording. And so we kind of formed this idea for a series and when the legislature ended, we kind of set out to to do the work of reporting on this.
And important to know, too, about this audio recording that it did. The meeting did take place in a church.
That's right, Riverside Baptist Church in Hutchison. Right.
So Rachel, just to draw you in here a bit. You started at the reflector in September. So this was your first legislative session here in Kansas. Did you notice just coming to it fresh, kind of the presence of religion at the Statehouse as legislators worked?
Yes, I think it gives you a bit of an advantage because coming into this with fresh eyes, you notice all this sort of entrenched religious beliefs and everything. One thing I thought was very interesting is the fact that in each Senate book and house have represented Live Action journal, what they do for the day, these prayers set up in front of each bit.
You know, these are prayers that they say at the start of every session every day throughout the legislative session, before the Senate in the house can start their work, they have somebody come out and say a prayer. And then they transcribe that prayer and recorded in their official journal every day.
Yeah. So let's talk about some of the subjects covered in the series. Sherman, you you mentioned them briefly just a few moments ago. But let's start with attacks on the LGBTQ community, particularly folks who are transgender, talk about the role of those attacks, and how those in kind of interface with interfaith interface with religion.
You know, there's this growing body of evidence that shows that, in particular, the attacks on the transgender community that we've seen in recent years, are really rooted in religious beliefs. That's very different from the message you hear sometimes from the supporters of this legislation, say, you know, they're trying to protect fairness and women's sports. Or there's a so called women's Bill of Rights, which is about protecting women in public spaces, ostensibly. But this is really about a religious ideology that they want to impose on the rest of the world. So we see this in legislative debate where, as we document in the story, their legislators to talk about wanting to do this on Ash Wednesday, that being a significant thing, Senator a couple of years ago, using Genesis as a reason for why we only have, you know, God only created a man and a woman, you know, there's no, no transgender here. And it's important to remember that these are not bills, the legislators in Kansas are thinking up on their own. These are bills that are written by a hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom. They're classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they have a lot of documentation for why they are a hate group. But they exist to attack the LGBTQ community from a faith based perspective. They're the ones who write these laws. They're the ones who are raising money to support the the political figures who support these laws. And, and that's the catalyst for doing this. You know, perhaps there are some legislators who are doing this because of political motivations. But the underlying theme in all of this is a sincerely held religious beliefs. Well, and
also important to note here, when you're talking about these these laws and this kind of national group that's behind them. This is a strategy and this is a legislative agenda that you're seeing play out in, you know, dozens of other states across the country this session.
That's right. It's not unique to Kansas.
So Rachel, let's, it seems like we're changing topics, but I think as we'll see in today's podcasts, and in this series, kind of all of these things blend together. So school vouchers were a huge sticking point this session. As you know, there were several attempts made ultimately unsuccessful to play to pass a voucher bill, telling me about how public education ended up being caught up in this kind of debate. Yeah, so
actually, I think the LGBTQ matter really ties well into school matter, because what we're seeing this session is kind of a shift away from public education and encouragement into private education. So that parents have like the ability to give their children moral groundings, maybe the public schools, some lawmakers think that they're not doing a good enough job of doing this. So what we're seeing with the voucher program is that people want their kids to go to private schools. In order to get this sort of moral and religious education. We're seeing that push by a couple lawmakers. I think rep. Christy Williams is a big one there. And one of her previous justifications for this kind of voucher program. She said it would help fill a god sized hole and some people, some Kansas children's hearts, and then again, with the LGBTQ matter, one reasoning that we need private schools is because our teachers are sort of indoctrinating kids with a woke sexualized agenda. That's a direct quote from some of the legislature Republicans.
Yeah, well, and it was actually rather remarkable when we I mean, earlier in the session when we even heard that quote, for the first time about the, you know, the God shaped hole in children's hearts, because again, as Sherman was saying, with the LGBTQ attacks, there, there's this attempt made to when talking about these issues for the general public to kind of sand off the religious edges of them to talk about them in terms of, you know, fairness in women's sports, women's Bill of Rights. And you know, likewise, I think with a lot of the school voucher thing there wasn't, there was a similar attempt to say, Oh, this doesn't have anything to do with what obviously has something to do with
it was branded as a school choice issue, right? Even though most Kansas counties, at least half Kansas County, Kansas counties don't have a private school available. Even though the voucher itself is not going to be enough money for a low income students actually leave their their private their public school and go to a private school. This is very clearly just in an attempt to funnel about $150 million of state funding public taxpayer money into the families of students who are already in private schools, primarily religious schools.
Well, and that's that's ultimately, the point whenever you're talking about private schools, or school vouchers, as the ultimate beneficiaries of these programs, are probably ultimately going to be religious institutions. That's right.
Or maybe we can see some micro schools set up by homeschooling parents. But that will also be the same intensely religious group we're looking at. But some of the other legislation that maybe didn't get so much attention as a vouchers that I thought was very interesting was parental rights legislation that made its reappearance again for the third year. It's basically saying that parents should have the right to take their kids out of any curriculum, any agenda, even a YouTube videos that they don't want their child watching. And this will be done to protect the kid from any worldview that the parent doesn't deem moral, or suitable for the religious upbringing. So that I think that was huge like that one would have very worrying implications.
And this was talked about extensively during that conversation and Reno county that we have the audio from. And I think there is a really odd comparison to what's happening in public schools to some sort of ancient religious warfare involving janissaries, which we don't have time to get into what that even means. But the idea was there, they're teaching things to your children so they can corrupt them and turn them against you. And they identified parental rights legislation as one of the answers. They also talked about legislation that Representative Patrick Penn, a Republican from Wichita apparently has written up but did not introduce this gear, that would enable parents to sue teachers directly for teaching them things that they don't want them to be taught.
So Sherman, Kansas, voters turned out on mass to protect a woman's rights, women's rights to abortion services, when we had a constitutional amendment vote last summer. But we saw during this legislative session that lawmakers were still interested in passing abortion restrictions. Several new abortion restrictions became law. So talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I think, you know, if you were like Rachel and just moved to the state in September, you might not have even known there was a referendum last year on abortion. We saw over and over again, these efforts to restrict access to abortion, from provisions that would be put into laws that seemingly wouldn't have anything to do with abortion, there's an effort to get more gynecologist in Kansas. So there's a new program to help with, with medical students with their expenses of going to school. It's kind of a scholarship program, but there's a provision in there that says, You can't do anything that deals with learning on how to provide abortions. And if you ever do, then you have to pay back all the money with I think, a 15% interest markup. But there is also you know, bills like the born again, the born alive, Bill, excuse me, which, you know, pretends that there's this issue where you try to abort a baby, but the baby survives the abortion. And so now you have to keep the baby alive, something that doesn't actually exist, but we have this law now that says you have to keep the baby alive if the abortion fails. There's there was a an attempt to prevent abortion providers from obtaining liability insurance through a state fund that they're required to pay into. And, you know, a couple other ideas that came up throughout the session. A lot of money that was being poured into pregnancy crisis centers now to help actively discourage women from seeking abortions
on again with crisis pregnancy centers. Again, these are often religiously affiliated institutions or, or whatever you would, would call them, they, you know, they they have a theological belief. They're trying to persuade women to take a certain route because of their owners religious religious, compunctions,
and this was, I think, really spilled out late in the session by Representative Henry Helgerson, he's a a Democrat, but he's also raised in the Catholic faith. And he talked about feeling conflicted between what he personally personally believes and what his constituents want and what the people of Kansas mean. clear that they once in the vote last year, and he said we are crossing a line now by imposing our religious beliefs on other people.
So finally, in terms of topics that were kind of covered in this series, we've heard the buzzwords of critical race theory before that, that came up last session and perhaps even earlier, but kind of racial issues in Kansas also have become part of the discussion here. Right.
Yeah, and I think this is something that is always kind of just bubbling below the surface in the legislative session. You know, we had the governor's response to the kind of social unrest after the murder of George Floyd and 2020 was to form a commission, and it involved, you know, police officers and district attorneys and advocates as well. And they they looked at interesting racial injustice issues around the states, and came up with a list of proposals, the legislature effectively threw that in the trash and then used it as a reason to attack the governor during her reelection campaign last year. We see, you know, over and over again, groups like progeny who come to the statehouse trying to enact reforms to benefits in particular, young people who are often targeted on the basis of race. And those kinds of concerns are just routinely ignored by the legislature. They don't pay attention to them. We saw in legislative debates this year, you know, ideas like this, this increasing penalties for fleeing and eluding police really heated debate over the idea that, you know, black people have a reason to fear police, they might run because they're scared. And as this was being talked about, on the floor, we had another legislator run up and say, you know, how dare you keep talking about race. Nothing here is about race. And of course, Representative Ford car Democrat from Wichita, went back to the well and said, You know, I'm not saying anybody here is racist, but you play the odds, somebody here is racist. And so it really moved this conversation into the forefront in a way that then spilled over in a more epic fashion than I think Rachel can talk about.
I mean, I think his exact words it's a white lawmaker was saying was at the body, the House of Representatives was too loving and too compassionate, to be racist. And then Ford car. In a very fiery speech, as we mentioned, he really went after it. But again, we've been constantly hearing this rhetoric of like, racism throughout the entire session, mostly recently, some top legislature Republicans issued a warning to Representative Ford card for some of his other mentions of slavery and racism, saying, Please watch your words be more decorous, or we might have to eventually do is take some action. And then response, we saw that he said something like, it's my job to protect your feelings, it's my job to help represent black Kansans. And a lot of I would say a lot of Republicans are outraged by this idea of racism in it, we're seeing this bleed over into everything. And that's why we're hearing so much about critical race theory in schools as well.
But it's also important to note, Sherman, that the conversation of this type, which I mean, it's it's quite extreme, some of what's said it's, it's on this this tape from the Reno county Republicans meeting like they, they deal with this topic at some length.
Right? There's this idea that everybody is descended from Adam and Eve, and everybody's the children of Noah. And so their, their idea is that race doesn't exist. And anybody who is claiming a, a race based accusation is being disingenuous, because we know race doesn't exist. But they also then pivot to say, you know, really demeaning things about why Black people are more likely to go to prison or targeted by police. And so it's, it's almost a it's a just as the sad irony of how they can justify ignoring what we, we know are racial and justices
in indeed, as you might tell, just if you've been listening to this, this, I mean, this series, in many ways, feels like it covers everything, and it kind of covers so many of the hot buttons from from this session. So let's talk about the reactions a little bit. I think it's important to note, first of all that both Rachael and Sherman as this series began publishing then went on extended vacations.
We chewed the firing pin off a grenade, handed it to clay and said Have fun. Let them take the heat for it. But didn't actually take heat. Right
Clay Well, so I mean, so this is what's really remarkable to me. We were talking about this just before We started recording the podcast. So we saw a lot of commentary come out about this series. And you know, if you're in the news business, it will often happen that if you have a big spicy story of one kind or another, other outlets will follow up with that story. They'll do some reporting on their own, they'll try to force you know, spin it forward in some way. You know, that's usually the procedure for when you have a big story or a scoop of some kind. But what we saw after this series was it actually served as a real spur to conversation. There were editorials written in the Kansas City Star in the St. Louis Post Dispatch of all places. We saw columns written by Representative, the representative, Reverend Tobias slingin, zeven. That was in the Topeka capital journal, Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes wrote an op ed that was also published in the Kansas City Star. The Insight a Kansas syndication service that sends out columns had a columnist write about this as well. So and then, you know, Rachel, you, you spoke about the series on case EUR, as well. So I think it's really fair to say that there was a lot of dialogue and a lot of conversation that was spurred by this series. And it really was almost immediately just, it was not people trying to report what we'd reported, but just reacting to what the series put out there. And so I guess, for Rachel and Sherman, was that kind of a surprise to you at all?
No, really, because if you look at it, like just listening to that audio alone, it was shocking, like, it's shocking things to hear. Because I mean, we, as journalists, we see what happens, we see the end result of this logic, but usually we don't get it like to hear the reasoning behind it. And this was just as you said, earlier, it was taking several masks off and seeing this is what lies behind everything we're seeing,
I always have some uneasiness about these kinds of projects, because I've written a number of like, in depth investigative kind of stories over the years. And sometimes they get some attention, sometimes they can just fall off the face of the earth, and nobody wants to pay attention to them. So I think it was just a few days before the first story hits, that it occurred to me that, that this may be of some consequence, because I was talking to somebody for one of the stories, who said, I'm really troubled by what you're telling me, is this audio. Should we report this to police? You know, they were very bothered by what I was saying. And I thought maybe this will have a broader reach than I anticipated. And I think it did, you know, we this day, one story, wound up being among our top two or three all time most read stories. And I think this kind of reaction conversation that we've started is perhaps unprecedented for the Kansas reflector.
Well, and I think it really speaks to the power that we that journalists, and, you know, opinion writers, or anybody really who's who's writing for the public can have, you know, there wasn't much about this story that was actually greatly secret. I mean, even the recording in and of itself, the, the guy who gave that, you know, Adam Peters, who gave that speech, much of his speech had already been posted to to rumble, you know, several weeks before our series was even published, I don't think it had been viewed by more than a couple of dozen people. So it but it's, it's really about assembling all of these pieces, and just showing how these things connect, in a way that, frankly, a lot of people don't really have the time or energy to put them together and see them that way. And I think
we can keep this conversation going as well. You know, I had people reaching out to me who were saying, basically, I am a faith leader in this area, and I'm very disturbed that this is how other faith leaders are making us all look. And I want to make sure people understand that, you know, Faith can be used in a in a positive way as well.
Well, Rachel, any final thoughts?
Just read our theories again.
I mean, always good advice. If you have a few extra minutes. Sherman Smith, Kansas reflect our editor in chief Rachel maidpro. Reporter And thank you so much for taking some time to talk today.
