October 2007 Cover
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By
Dawn Ivory
Hats off to Missouri state Sen. Chris Koster, billed as a "rising Republican star" and chair of the Missouri Senate's GOP caucus. Readers may gape: Dawn praising a Republican? Not exactly; Koster, a former prosecutor, grew so disgusted with his party's slavish devotion to what he terms "religious extremists" that he... switched parties and became a Democrat!
Koster's announcement noted his disagreement with his former party over deep cuts in Medicaid coverage and family-planning programs, but he saved his most thunderous invective for Republican opposition to embryonic stem-cell research: "The Republican desire is to criminalize early-stage stem-cell research in our state," Koster said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Go to Boston for your Nobel Prize; come to Missouri for your leg irons. And the Missouri Republican Party not only tolerates this lunacy, but embraces it," Koster continued.
The final straw, Koster said, came this spring when Republicans struck down a state law requiring public schools to give students comprehensive, medically accurate information on sexually transmitted diseases and birth control, substituting instead a call to only preach abstinence.
"I knew at that moment," Koster said. "For me, leaving was the right, the moral thing to do."
U.S. Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe -- anything you want to say?
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Dirty Dishes!
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