To the editor:

The Republican Party in Kansas and at the national level promotes itself as the party of small government and local control. While I don’t tend to agree with many of the stances the party adopts, often its positions at least seem to reflect a coherent philosophy.

I find myself baffled, however, about how Republican Party leaders could see a statewide ban on “obscenity,” presumably to be defined by the state Legislature, as representing either small government or local control. Instead, such a position seems to suggest that local school districts – and the parents within them – can’t be trusted to determine what is appropriate in the education of their children and whether or not a particular work of art or literature is more educational than “pornographic.”

There are many conclusions that can be drawn from the proposal that the Republican Party adopt a position that asserts this level of state control over local districts in its statewide platform, but the promotion of small government and local control aren’t among them.

Noel Rasor,

Lawrence