Farewell, Steven
In which I wrap up my correspondence with Representative Steven Howe
Dear Steven:
I saw you at the Kansas Statehouse the other day. Equality Day, actually, when scads of queer and queer-supporting folks gathered to rally and hear speeches from legislators and activists and allies, then meet with legislators to mostly beg and plead for some minimal recognition of their dignity as human beings, for all the good that might do.
You passed through the throng, stopping for a moment or two just a few feet in front of me to speak with a person I kinda-sorta know, probably to arrange a meet with Salina attendees to hear their concerns. Then you strode on.
I didn’t introduce myself. Our family was there for the gathering, not for you. It’s not like we would have had a deep heart-to-heart in that moment anyway—although I did briefly imagine tapping you on the shoulder, shoving my hand into yours, squeezing and not letting go, stating my name and reminding you that I’ve been writing to you, all while copping an expression something like a mashup of, well, these guys:
But the statehouse security guys were friendly that day, and I didn’t want to, you know, center myself by getting removed in cuffs.
I’ve been writing to you lately about how deeply immoral your party’s targeting and oppression of transgender folks is, and in my last entry, of Feb. 27, I straight up asked you a pretty clear question:
I’m especially interested in how you can justify targeting transgender children in our state, especially given your apparently sincere concern for other children. The same goes for the respective families of both groups. My first letter to you was pretty exclusively focused on trans rights, asking you, specifically, to help sustain the governor’s veto of SB 63. You didn’t do so. Advocacy for trans folks has been prominent in all my letters to you, yet you said not a word in response about it.
Why care about disabled kids yet target trans kids? Is it because you believe transness is a choice, while disability isn’t? Is it because of religious convictions that you’re importing into your judgment to make binding laws for a widely pluralistic state population? Is it because you simply don’t know anything except vitriol and negativity about trans folks, and you haven’t gone looking for counterpoints?
Why do you—as your votes, party affiliation, actions, and silence on the very plain and dominant theme of trans rights in my letters to you strongly indicate—hate trans people?
You haven’t responded. You had responded to a previous letter, so I thought maybe we were opening a bit of a dialogue, though I felt that reply was disingenuous and trying to dodge the obvious subject. I even offered to take the conversation private if you asked, or if I simply felt you were being brave, vulnerable, candid, and searching in your reply. But there was no reply to this latest question.
You voted for the anti-trans “Help Not Harm Act.” Twice. Why?
You voted for HB 2311—basically creating a right for anti-gay and anti-trans bigots to adopt kids who are, or may be, LGBTQIA+, thus overriding the best interests of those kids. Why?
If you get the chance—and maybe it’s dead this year, hard to keep up with so much bullying in Topeka by your party—you’ll probably vote for SB 76, the “Given Name Act” that threatens and chills and maybe (depending on final version) criminalizes educators’ speech should they refer to students the way those students ask to be referred to.
And you voted to amend the state constitution to allow our supreme court judges to be elected, turning the rule of law in Kansas into a partisan (and probably money-laundered) contest of scapegoating, grievance, and demagoguery. The measure will be decided in an August primary vote where your Republican co-partisans have the turnout advantage, of course, another anti-democratic twist of the knife. I include this because courts are a bulwark against animus-driven campaigns that target politically unpopular minorities tarred with factually-absent fear-mongering, and because bodily autonomy rulings in Kansas protect not only reproductive healthcare but also stand as a key guarantor of all personal healthcare decisions.
Why Pick On You?
You may wonder, Steven, why I’m singling you out. Well, you popped onto my radar with your anti-DEI crusade last year, and I still haven’t forgiven you for that affront to democracy, to academic freedom, to logic, to honesty, to all that I deem decent. And you got away with it, thanks to the mediocrity of the minds and the mendacity of the morals in your party and their dominance in my state legislature.
It didn’t have to be this way. You didn’t have to be the carrier of that bill. But you chose to. And you got your way. I sure hope you’re tracking the way the anti-DEI train whose boiler you shoveled coal into is erasing the accomplishments of war heroes and great Americans. I hope you feel some shame.
But beyond that, there’s process of elimination. J. R. Claeys is bought and sold, a property of Kobach and Brownback and Koch. Dawn Wolf is too new and unknown (hiding?) to comment on. Clarke Sanders is well known to me, and he’s a lost cause.
To an extent, that leaves you, Stephen. What I’ve heard is that you’re a decent guy. In Kansas, having a “decent” Republican is the closest thing we ever get to having a Democrat in office. Yes, that’s pitiful, but you work with what you’ve got. And like the anger many folks feel at the national Dems who capitulate, cave, fail to meet the moment, and seem out of touch with zero plan to counter competitive authoritarianism / dictatorship / Orbanism / illiberal democracy / fascism / what-have-you being enacted in real time by the Trump Administration, I am angry that allegedly “decent” Republicans in Kansas are doing nothing in the face of deeply immoral, illiberal, and anti-American efforts in the Kansas legislature right now.
Given your rep and what folks have said about you, that puts you in the spotlight.
An Inquiry into Morals
This has been an inquiry to see if you have a conscience and a spine. Maybe a brain as well.
You seemed, once, to have principles and consciousness: when you, cautiously, suggested other Republicans join you in refusing to back Trump for re-election.
But then you went back on that, with a flimsy excuse.
You made anti-DEI your issue in 2024, attempting to sound as if you were an advocate for freedom and an opponent of McCarthyism, but the whole effort was so abysmally ignorant of history, political philosophy … so full of strawman arguments and evasions as to what “DEI” and “ideology” meant, that it was impossible to believe you and your colleagues were acting in good faith. Although, I guess, one can be sincerely incredibly stupid.
Your heartfelt advocacy for disabled kids and increased funding for them was chock full of holes, given your and your party’s antithetical positions on so many interconnected measures and issues. And said advocacy amounted to you saying, I wanted to do something against this, but it wouldn’t have worked, so I didn’t do the thing, instead, I’m just telling you the story of how I wanted to. Which maybe made you look good to the casual viewer, but doesn’t improve anyone’s life one iota.
So, yeah, I guess I kinda view you like I view Chuck Schumer (interesting typo just now: I accidently, or Freudianly, wrote Cuck Schumer). While you have none of Schumer’s historic accomplishments in the various causes of decency as a legislator, you do seem to be failing to meet the moment and display the value of having an allegedly “good guy” in office.
If the allegedly “decent” Republican who isn’t bought and sold or a lost cause is indistinguishable from the rest of them when it comes time to cast votes, what good is he? The votes are the actions. The rest is image, performance, impression-management, PR, maybe pastoral care for the sick and dying you failed to help in any way when it mattered.
I’m harsher on you here in these letters than you are on your Republican colleagues over the issues you claim to care so deeply about when you speak at the Well. And I’m just trying to morally exhort you and pin facts and rhetoric to action to showcase a chasm between decency and action, between principles and behavior.
In the end, I have to believe that you either agree, deep down, with the worst of your colleagues—that trans and maybe all other queer kids are defective abominations and need to be erased through state persecution and smothering, that their parents are abusers, that their doctors are quacks needing to be frightened with sanctions or scared out of the state—or that you’re too characterologically weak to do anything about your colleagues’ march to eradicating them.
Maybe you tell yourself that it’s a lost cause, that you’re facing a head-shaking level of irrational animus that just can’t be defeated by one guy, by one speech, by one defection. That such singular acts would only immolate your own ability to get anything accomplished in your party, in the legislature.
Well, what, for instance? What are you so vital for, Steven? What is it that hangs on your specific presence, your singular voice, in the legislature? What will be scuttled if you effectively become persona non grata among your hateful peers (assuming you’re not one of them)?
Or maybe you’re not so special in promoting X, Y or Z. Maybe you towing the line and not making waves is vital in avoiding retaliation—and not even against you, but against your district, your city. Maybe, if you defect too stridently, if you dissent too forcefully, the baddies in your party will start singling out Salina for special punishment, cutting or rescinding various obscure things only legislative wonks know about, screwing over the people you represent for your apostasy. Maybe that’s why you remain a tortured loyalist.
Well, shucks, Steven. All I can tell you is that, if this is the case, you have to choose. Do you stand with the powerful against the powerless? Do you go along to get along? Do you count up the “normal” folks you represent and value them more highly than the “weirdos and outliers” you are simultaneously abusing? Do you shove the rich men through the eye of the needle, no matter how many of the “least of these” you have to sacrifice as the millstones accumulate on the chain around your neck?
Yeah, mixed metaphors out the wazoo. Hell, this is not my idiom, though I was raised in it.
What I’m saying here is that the time for useless-but-maybe-nice people in positions of power is ending, and I’m not from the faction that ended it. I may not be speaking to you in the language of niceness, but I am trying to speak to you in the service of kindness, and the two are not the same. To be kind, you sometimes have to stop being nice. To be just, you sometimes have to break the peace, especially when the peace is based on a stifling and spreading oppression.
I have no idea what holds you back, if indeed you are a decent person, a person with a conscience, a spine, a brain. An informed conscience—which is crucial. Since you don’t seem to want to correspond anymore, I’ll probably just write about you in future, not to you. Absent any demonstrable reform, reparation, metanoia, I hope you lose re-election, if you stand for it.
Absent those things, I hope your legacy will be that you helped destroy the Kansas part of America in your own little way, while claiming to not like it very much. If so, the irony will be that history, if it remembers you at all, will remember you as too weak to have even been a hero to the bad guys.
I’m sorry this attempt at reaching you didn’t work out. I wish your family well, at least as much as I’m capable. That is, I place you low on the list, after all the people whose lives you’ve made harder thanks to your participation and complicity. But you’re still on the list somewhere.
With pity,
James
