A Boy's Life

Explaining the Legislature's rationale for leaving same-sex offenders out of the Romeo and Juliet law, Kline says, "The reality is that most children are oriented toward heterosexuality, and sexual development is a fragile development. In fact, it's one of the areas that's most often abused. And so to nurture and protect, we have laws, age-of-consent laws and so forth, which say children do not have the emotional capacity to consent to sexual relations.

"Additionally, we segregate children by gender in activities to protect their developing sexuality and to provide role models," Kline continues. "And where an abuse occurs ... the potential harm to the child is greater when a role model, or someone of the same gender, commits that abuse. Additionally, it most likely affects their sexual development more greatly than if it were heterosexual."

Kline says there's a difference between unfair and unconstitutional.

"The ACLU is essentially misleading the debate here, and here's why," Kline says. "They're saying it's about fairness, and it's not about fairness. Not to say that fairness is unimportant, but fairness debates occur in the Legislature. And I would agree that you can put a legitimate argument out there that his sentence is unfair.... Everybody who's been sentenced for a crime claims things are unfair."

"That's absurd," says Matt Coles, director of the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. "If he's making arguments about the Constitution that he doesn't believe are right, he doesn't belong in that job as attorney general. That's an outrageous thing to say. He's made a whole series of claims about why it's legitimate for the state to do this, and he shouldn't make those claims if he doesn't think they're true, absolutely."

Kline says laws should be changed by legislation, not by the courts. "[The courts] draw a line that rests in perpetuity," he says. "The Legislature can work with these issues and respond to [changing] societal concerns."

"That whole argument is a red herring," Lange counters. "The Legislature cannot undo Matthew's conviction. It all comes back to basic civics lessons that everyone learned in grade school history class. It is the role of legislature to determine public policy, and the role of the courts is to interpret both federal and state constitutions and limit the role of legislature when it oversteps its bounds and treads on constitutional rights."

Adkins, who ran unsuccessfully against Kline for attorney general in 2002, says he recognizes Kline's argument as one he's heard before. He heard it from the far right in November in Massachusetts, where that state's Supreme Court decided to allow gay marriage. And he heard it in Alabama, where controversy erupted over a statue of the Ten Commandments in that state's Supreme Court building. The argument that these things should be left up to state legislatures is, he says, "the new code language emerging everywhere."

"We're seeing an emerging populist rhetoric in which elitist, robed judges are said to be out of touch with the needs of society," Adkins adds. "It's a lot like the old states' rights arguments from Civil War times, and it's dark and ugly. We all know politicians can do stupid things that result in stuff like the internment of the Japanese in World War II and separate schools for black children, and the courts are able to step in and provide the check."

In a section of his brief titled "It Is Left to the Legislature -- and Not This Court -- to Legislate Morality," Kline describes the future as he sees it if Limon goes free: "[This] will begin a toppling of dominoes which is likely to end with the Kansas marriage law on the scrap heap. Pull a thread on the social fabric that will begin an unseaming (and unseemly) process that will end with the State being unable to protect minor children from falling prey to sexual predators while in state institutions, among other deleterious aftershocks."

In a footnote, Kline adds, "Any court that handed Mr. Limon a win ... would at the same time (perhaps unwittingly) bring about a court-ordered redefinition of marriage that prohibited all distinctions based on 'sexual orientation.' Sexual desires rather than communal and historic sensitives would then define the marital relationship, allowing such combinations as three party marriages, incestuous marriages, child brides, and other less-than-desirable couplings."

Kline says he's only doing his job, just as his predecessor, Attorney General Carla Stovall, did before him. "[The ACLU is] in a court of law asking the court to strike down a statute. And I am defending it, just like General Stovall did successfully," he says.

But Kline has made the Limon case a "political cause célèbre," Adkins says. "He's saying Armageddon will ensue, and if the ACLU gets its way we'll have dogs and cats sleeping together and lightning shooting from the sky, interrupting civil society as we know it."