News & Commentary

The ACLU of Kansas also criticized the bill’s passage. “Bathroom bans are grounded in prejudice and misinformation,” said Logan Demond, ACLU of Kansas policy director in a statement on the organization’s website. “And they don’t actually make anyone safer.”

Micah Kubic, ACLU of Kansas Executive Director, said in part in a statement on the group’s website: “This bill undermines our state’s strong constitutional protections against government overreach and persecution. It subjects people to unacceptable privacy violations and puts them in harm’s way. Discriminatory laws like this bill violate the fundamental rights guaranteed by the state constitution. They contradict what it means to be a Kansan.”

Logan DeMond, ACLU of Kansas policy director, said in a statement that the bill opens up all Kansans to “scrutiny and gender policing by strangers.”

The Kansas attorney general and the solicitor general have both been sanctioned $1 because of a filing in the ongoing legal battle over gender markers on driver's licenses.

Attorneys for the State of Kansas who are defending a state law banning gender-affirming care for minors have notified a Douglas County ...

The families, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas and the law firm Ballard Spahr, want a Douglas County District Court judge to issue a temporary injunction on the ban.

Kobach and top legislative leadership had wanted Republican lawmakers to address SB 180 at a special session in addition to partisan redistricting. While amending the law could resolve statutory interpretation issues, it would not resolve constitutional claims raised by transgender people represented by the ACLU.

After the Kansas Supreme Court declined in September to hear an appeal on Senate Bill 180, the case is now back in Shawnee County District Court. The lawsuit pits Attorney General Kris Kobach against Gov. Laura Kelly's administration and a group of transgender Kansans represented by the ACLU.

“Mr. Kobach is claiming that he is standing up for girls and women,” ACLU Executive Director Micah Kubic wrote on May 14, 2024. “But what he is really doing is continuing his decades-long crusade against our shared values and fundamental rights, using his misleading legal interpretations to try to transform the law into a tool that persecutes Kansans instead of protecting them.”