Kansas, 2021 A.D.<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=United+Nations+flag&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=69512779&src=5e305052bb6cdd42cac893a9a16ae557-1-41">L F File</a>/Shutterstock; <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-45065668/stock-photo-hay-bale-against-ominous-sky.html?src=p-45135217">Rudy Lopez Photography</a>/Shutterstock
United Nations, you’re on notice.
Kansas recently became the latest state to take proactive steps to avert a communist–environmentalist takeover. On Monday, a committee in the state house of representatives approved a resolution “opposing and exposing the radical nature of United Nations Agenda 21 and its destructiveness to the principles of the founding documents of the United States of America.” Agenda 21, a two-decades-old non-binding agreement that was never ratified by the Senate, is designed to promote sustainable development and responsible environmental stewardship, but in the eyes of conservatives it has morphed into a vehicle for a green dystopia.
Arizona came to close to passing a similar provision last month, but the bill stalled in the legislature. As a Minnesota state senator, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) alleged that Agenda 21 would effectively ban the manufacture of light bulbs. Other activists believe that Agenda 21 will consign Americans to live in petite earthen “Hobbit Houses,” and forcibly displace rural residents in the name of biodiversity.
The Topeka Capital Journal reporters that the bill’s sponsors, GOP Reps. Greg Smith and Forrest Knox, were just being cautious:
Smith, Knox and Hedke described the nonbinding U.N. agreement signed by 178 nations in 1992 as an unauthorized power grab by radical environmentalists bent on ending private property rights in favor of communism. They said it is pervading local governments and is “an aggressive attack on individual liberty and the foundation of our country.”
With the session winding down, it’s unclear whether the Agenda 21 resolution will make it to the floor for a vote, but in a GOP-dominated legislature it would stand a good chance of passing. Meanwhile, the legislature is covering all of its bases. The same day it moved the anti-sustainability bill forward, the Kansas House passed—by a vote of 120 to 0—a bill designed to prevent Islamic Shariah law from creeping into state courts. The “Kansas Law for Kansas Courts Act” is nearly identical to bills that have been introduced in two dozen other states.
The silver lining in all of this is that those two votes took up time that could have been spent making legal abortions more expensive and harder to get, but apparently the Kansas House still found a way to do that, too. All in a day’s work.
