I had a conversation yesterday afternoon with Sue Peterson, who serves as
a legislative liaison with K-State.  She is a wonderful woman.  We talked
about what she knew about the request, and what it may mean.  She had some
interesting background to tell me.


It seems this request has a possible history behind it.  First off, a
similar situation occurred in Iowa last year, with the result that there
was an attempt (I don't know if it was successful) to add an
appropriations bill saying that universities that taught homosexuality
could be denied funding.

Here in Kansas, Sue links this incident to something that occurred this
summer:  One of the things that the Extension office here is involved
with is 4H.  4H takes on certain issues to teach the kids.  One of these
issues is human sexuality.  In their literature, 4H talked about different
kinds of families, and included same-sex parents.  A couple of legislators
heard about this and were outraged.  So Sue and another one of her
colleagues had to fight this out, and some sort of compromise was made in
the end, although Sue assures me it didn't sacrifice any educational
freedom issues.  During this fight, it became known that K-State and KU
have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation - we are
the only two of the regents schools that have that.  Since there is no
federal law requiring sexual orientation to be included in
non-discrimination clauses, the legislators demanded that K-State and KU
remove the sexual orientation clause.  Dr. Wefald (K-State's
president) refused to do that, and so things stood.

 Sue has no proof that this is related, but she strongly suspects it.


The AP has picked up the story and done an article of their own.  The
reporter asked the Legislative Research Department who the requestors
were, and was denied the information.  Then the reporter asked 3 or 4
"prime suspects" if they were the ones that made the request.  All of them
denied that they made the request.  So as of now, absolutely no-one
actually knows who they were.  Or at least, no-one who is talking.

An interesting point that Sue made about the AP article was that it
specifically mentioned in the title that the request was anonymous, which
should automatically make the average citizen suspicious of the whole
thing - after all, if someone is acting according to principles, then they
shouldn't be trying so hard to hide.

So it all ends up that while Sue doesn't necessarily think this is over,
she wants to assure us that K-State will stand by the policy it has taken
(that is, by giving only the information that anyone could find simply by
perusing a line schedule). She made sure I knew that if I had any
questions at any time, I could get back with her and she would respond to
me as soon as she could.

I hope that I made sense to everyone.