Kansas 15-year-olds with restricted licenses will soon be able to drive to church and youth group
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Kansas 15-year-olds with a restricted license will soon be able to drive to church or other religious activities.
Gov. Laura Kelly on Monday signed SB 446, which grants teenagers a religious exemption to driver's license restrictions. It previously passed the House 87-30 and the Senate 38-0.
Lawmakers rewrote statutes to entitle 15-year-olds with a restricted license to drive, between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., "directly to or from any religious activity held by a religious organization."
Statutes already permit driving to farm-related work, jobs and school.
Similarly, 16-year-olds with a restricted license are already allowed to drive to religious worship services, school activities, farm-related work and jobs between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. The new law expands the exemption by changing the wording from "religious worship service" to "religious activity" held by a religious organization.
The language allows the religious exemption to cover a Sunday school Bible study or Wednesday evening youth group meetings that take place outside of traditional worship services.
Existing law defines "religious organization" to generally mean a church or other "bona fide" religious group that has an established place of worship and meets at least once a week.
The teens are allowed have siblings as passengers.
The law will take effect after its publication in the statute book, which happens July 1.
Lawmakers debated bill in February
The proposal was first debated during a House Transportation Committee hearing in February on HB 2609, which originally contained the legislation.
Rep. Charlotte Esau, R-Olathe, introduced the original bill with bipartisan support from 46 other lawmakers after a friend asked her about allowing 15-year-old to drive to church.
"One of the things that I found very quickly when I started to talk about this bill with a couple of folks is that it was very much presumed that we could do this, or if we couldn't do it, why couldn't we do it," Esau said.
Rep. Leo Delperdang, R-Wichita, noted that not all religions, let alone all Christian denominations, worship on Sundays. He implied that it could open the door for teenage drivers to falsely claim religious exemptions.
"If I'm out cruising around on a Saturday night at 15 years old in my car and I get pulled over, can I say I'm Seventh-day Adventist, I'm heading off to my worship service?" Delperdang asked. "Do I need to be able to prove such a thing?"
"Well, I don't believe we actually have to prove it when it comes to work and school," Esau replied. "But there's nothing to stop an officer from, say, following you to make sure you're actually going where you said you were going."
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Religious liberty
Salina pastor Jeff Piepho, a father of six children, said he contacted Esau about what he considered to be an oversight in the previous law.
After hiring someone to take over as youth group leader, "I thought great, now I won't have to come on Wednesday nights anymore," Piepho said. "My daughter could just drive them."
He then discovered that 15-year-olds weren't allowed to drive to church.
"I love my children, but I don't love driving them everywhere," he said.
He reasoned that driving to church is safer than driving to school because far fewer teens drive to a typical religious activity than to an average high school.
He also argued that the previous law may violate freedom of religion protections in the Kansas and U.S. constitutions. The Supreme Court has ruled that the government must have a compelling interest to infringe on religious rights.
"Of course we have compelling reasons not to allow a 10-year-old to drive to religious services," Piepho said. "It would be a little dangerous. But if the state allows a teenager to drive to work or to school alone, then we don't really have a compelling reason to stop them from driving to a religious service, which is constitutionally protected."
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Basehor-Linwood Middle School student Brayden Jones was 14 when the committee met in February, but testified that he would be testing for the restricted license in a few months.
The son of a working mother and a father who is often away with the Army, Brayden said that depending on adults for transportation for himself and his 6-year-old sister "can be a hardship for those of us like me who live in the country, and it means sometimes we just do not get to go if no one can take us."
Jason Tidd is a statehouse reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached by email at jtidd@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jason_Tidd.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas teenagers can drive to church at age 15 with restricted license
