(AgapePress) - A pro-family leader is denouncing a court decision to overturn Kansas law that punished underage sex more severely if it involved homosexual acts.

The Kansas Supreme Court recently ruled unanimously that the State must impose the same penalties for statutory rape regardless of whether the sex was heterosexual or homosexual. Writing for the court, Justice Marla Luckert stated, "The moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest."

However, the director of the Culture and Family Institute (CFI), Bob Knight, feels the ruling is a classic example of what he calls "group identity politics." Moreover, he says the decision "runs roughshod" over the rights of a state to determine its own moral climate.

Bob Knight

"Kansas has every right to say that some behavior is more dangerous than others," Knight contends. "In this case [the state legislators] thought it was dangerous to have kids being preyed upon by homosexual pedophiles, and so they had greater penalties. That means the state is looking at homosexual behavior as particularly dangerous -- and it is."

The pro-family spokesman thinks the Kansas high court's opinion sets bad precedent. "For the judge to say that, well, you can't have this because you can't have moral disapproval of a group means you can't disapprove of any particular behavior," he asserts.

Knight strongly disagrees with the sentiments expressed in Justice Luckert's opinion. "Her reasoning is very dangerous," he says, "and it smacks of the kind of reasoning we saw in Lawrence v. Texas when the Supreme Court struck down the sodomy laws in Texas and said that morality is no longer a rational basis for upholding any law."

This kind of reasoning, the CFI director notes, is "a very destructive trend in the law -- that morality in and of itself is a form of discrimination; so, therefore, a law can be struck down if there's any moral basis for it." Knight feels Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline should appeal the ruling.

Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.

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