This blatantly discriminatory sentencing provision does not live up to American standards of equal justice. —Judge Pierron

My comments: This just absolutely breaks my heart. This poor boy. Goddess only knows what hell he may be going through in prison. Gods, I hope someone is looking out for him... A mildly mentally retarded young man, essentially a boy himself, sent to prison on a sodomy charge. He may as well be a Jew at Auschwitz. Fucking goddamn bastards who sent him there!!! And now two more have denied him freedom. Man, when they get the bad Karma that's coming to them, well, then I'll probably have pity for them too... But right now I swear I could ring their necks! What kind of monster could do such a thing?! How can they live with themselves? Self-righteous, morally-bankrupt, cold, callous bigots!

Apparently things had been looking pretty good for Matthew's case after the US Supreme Court, upon overturning the Texas sodomy law, ordered the Kansas Court of Appeals to review his case. The one compassionate human being among the three on the panel, Judge G. Joseph Pierron Jr. (the dissenter in this week's ruling), last month said to the prosecutor: "I'm just trying to come up with a reason, other than you don't like homosexuals."(!) But unfortunately his voice of reason and fairness was outweighed by the other two (Judges Henry W. Green Jr. and Tom Malone) who essentially upheld the right of the legislature to make discriminatory laws. As Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal put it: "This is an opinion that reflects an archaic set of attitudes about homosexuality that the U.S. Supreme Court completely transcended." Well, hope remains for poor Matthew Limon in the form of the Kansas and US Supreme Courts. If Limon's case makes it to the highest court in the nation, hopefully it will still possess the attitude of reason and fairness that caused it to order this review in the first place... Yet another very good reason to FLUSH BUSH in 2004!

On a broader note, all the more infuriating and heart-wrenching and sickening is that Limon is not an exception to the rule. The mentally disabled and the mentally ill are routinely imprisoned in this country, and that is a horrific crime against humanity! Of course I think our entire prison system is fundamentally flawed, grossly ineffective, and conclusively inhumane... But imprisoning a mentally ill or mentally disabled person is the moral equivalent of raping or battering a child: a brutal and senseless use of force against an utterly defenseless human being, one for whom society has the utmost responsibility to protect and care. Every one of these individuals whom we have imprisoned bears witness to our vast failure as a human society.

Let's send Green and Malone to prison instead, and give them a swift kick in the ass while we're at it! They should be disbarred on charges of utter failure to display even an ounce of basic humanity...