Kris Kobach should be impeached for coercing school districts to target trans kids | Opinion

If the law doesn’t give you what you want, try intimidation.

That’s the reprehensible tactic that our state’s biggest schoolyard bully, Attorney General Kris Kobach, is using in a dangerous attack on transgender children for fun and political profit (his own).

From his elected perch as the “state’s top law-enforcement official,” Kobach sent legal-sounding threatening letters to six Kansas school districts targeted by a D.C.-area pressure group with ties to the Koch Industries political machine.

The letters demand that the districts rescind existing school policies and force their employees to immediately inform parents if their child is “gender non-conforming” at school. Two districts have complied, four are resisting.

In his threat letters, Kobach cites no actual law, because Kansas doesn’t have one.

A bill to do what Kobach wants to do failed last year in committee at the Legislature, most likely because there are enough lawmakers in both parties who recognize the profound and present danger it represents to children.

Endangering children

When kids are involuntarily “outed” to their parents, the potential outcomes range from “We love you more than anything and we want to understand what you’re going through, so let’s talk,” to “I’ma gonna beat that little queer until he starts actin’ like a man.”

The consequences of ill-considered disclosure are severe, sometimes fatal.

There’s an elevated risk of suicide when transgender youth are mishandled at school and home, according to a joint study by researchers at Barry University of Florida, the University of Toronto and Ohio State.

“Fifty-six percent of (transgender) youth reported a previous suicide attempt and 86% reported suicidality,” the study reported. “School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made a unique, statistically significant contribution to past 6-month suicidality.”

The multi-agency federal website Youth.gov identified “family rejection resulting from sexual orientation or gender identity,” as the No. 1 reason for LGBTQ youth homelessness. “Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse” came in second.

“LGBTQ youth are at more than double the risk of homelessness compared to non-LGBTQ peers,” according to the Chapin Hall Research Institute at the University of Chicago.

Homeless LGBTQ youth are three times as likely to have exchanged sex for basic needs and 2 1/2 times as likely to have been forced to have sex, Chapin Hall found.

Educators and school psychologists understand all this, and they’re trained and positioned to read situations and determine case-by-case if they’d be putting a child in harm’s way by notifying parents.

We can trust their judgment far more than we can trust Kobach’s grandstanding.

In addition to implying that the school districts are violating laws that don’t exist, Kobach demanded that school officials answer an interrogation echoing Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-scare reign of terror in the 1950s.

For example:

“If such a (nondisclosure) policy exists, who formulated and/or drafted the policy? Please identify every person involved, regardless of whether such person was a District employee or otherwise paid by the district; include consultants, volunteers, activists, and all other persons. Also, please identify the role each person played in formulating and/or drafting it.”

There’s no reason for Kobach to have that information and whatever he plans to do with it, it can’t be good.

It smacks of an enemies list, so If you work for a school district, or wrote a letter or commented to the school board in favor of LGBTQ-friendly policies, be afraid.

Maize, Belle Plaine districts cave to pressure

Kobach sent his threat letters to six school districts.

Two of them, Maize USD 266 and Belle Plaine USD 357, cravenly caved and rescinded their policies — and shame on them for that.

Four districts, Kansas City USD 500, Olathe USD 233, Shawnee Mission USD 512 and Topeka USD 501, stood up for their kids and against Kobach’s phony legal drama, so props to them.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a legal analysis Friday backing the districts that are telling Kobach to go pound sand:

“Students have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to information about their sexual orientation or gender identity. It is unlawful for school officials to disclose that information. Forced outing of transgender students likely violates federal privacy laws in addition to students’ constitutional privacy rights.”

The Koch connection

Kobach’s crackdown on school districts’ handling of queer kids absolutely drips with hypocrisy.

His press release offers this quote from Deputy Attorney General Abhishek Kambli: “A lot of times these policies are pushed by outside activist organizations and adopted by school boards without being fully informed about what the policy would actually do.”

That’s an astonishingly arrogant and galling statement, because Kobach’s the one doing the bidding of “outside activist organizations.”

His own letters admit that he targeted school districts based on a hit list he got from Parents Defending Education, a political action group in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Virginia.

PDE has compiled a slick website containing policies from more than 1,000 school districts across the nation that the group claims violate “parents’ rights” — the same language Kobach’s using in lieu of actual legal grounds for harassing the schools.

PDE files its taxes as a nonprofit charitable organization.

Its tax forms show it was founded in 2021 and in its first two years of operation, it collected about $7.4 million in grants and donations and paid its founder and president, Nicole Neily, nearly half a million dollars.

You don’t get that kind of money from bake sales.

“Neily is closely affiliated with the Koch network, having worked for the Franklin News Foundation and the Cato Institute, FreedomWorks, serving as a Koch fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights, and serving as a board member for Young Voices and Young Americans for Liberty,” according to SourceWatch, a website run by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Neily’s vice president, Caroline Moore, a former staffer in the Trump White House, has also worked for at least two Koch-funded political operations, the Federalist Society and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Maybe Kobach’s attack on gender non-conforming students represents a shift in Koch strategy, from trying to destroy public education in general to trying to destroy individual kids in schools.

Whatever this is, it’s grossly misguided and Kobach’s an all-too-willing participant in the plot.

What Kobach is doing is worthy of impeachment proceedings, although that will never happen in our Republican-dominated Kansas Legislature.

Kobach has abused his title, his powers and his office in this attempt to coerce school officials to endanger transgender kids without legal grounds, and he’s threatened citizens’ privacy and rights.

He does so in pursuit of political ambition, instead of enforcing state law, which is what we pay him for and what he swore an oath to do.

It won’t end until we vote him out.

Our next opportunity will be Nov. 3, 2026.

Mark your calendar.