Kansas City Strip

Knock the vote: Kay O’Connor seems to make Kansas’ creationists look progressive. Much of the world now sees the state senator, an Olathe Republican, as a sort of Taliban Carrie Nation, wanting to smash voting booths with a pickax to prevent women from voting.

It all began when a Kansas City Star reporter overheard O’Connor reject a “Celebrate the Right to Vote” luncheon invitation from the League of Women Voters. “I know those people do not support me,” O’Connor tells the Pitch, although the League is usually nonpartisan. “I am conservative, and they are not.”

Worldwide condemnation came Friday after the Star reported O’Connor saying that women wouldn’t need to vote if only “men were taking care of women” adequately.

Reading that, a friend called and asked why she was so harsh to her husband, O’Connor says.

So Mr. Bud O’Connor, what’s up with that? Why can’t you give the little missus what she needs?

“I’ve been married to the same man for 42 years,” Kay says. “The fact that we’re still married is a tribute to my husband.”

And to her too, of course. Pundits have noted that she left homemaking for the job market in order to pay her daughter’s health expenses, but it’s not so widely known that, as O’Connor says, “We were paying bills four years after she was dead and buried.”

Bonnie O’Connor had four heart surgeries in six years. Kay O’Connor worked and stood vigils at the hospital while Bud O’Connor worked and took care of their other five youngsters. Bonnie died at age fourteen in 1985.

Lots of marriages fail under those kinds of pressures, so it seems there’s more humanity than hypocrisy in O’Connor’s yearning for “an ideal world” where women such as herself wouldn’t need to serve in government or anywhere else in the workplace.

O’Connor says she has voted ever since she was old enough. She even supports the Nineteenth Amendment, though she doesn’t celebrate its existence. “I disagree with celebrating that women felt so oppressed by men that they needed to be liberated from oppressive men.”

The problem comes when women vote with emotions rather than intellect. “It’s public knowledge that it was the women who voted Bill Clinton into office.”