On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey spoke with Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway about her office’s lawsuit against Kansas City over its race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences.

Listen to more from KCMO Talk Radio here.

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On July 22, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed a lawsuit against Kansas City for violating anti-discrimination laws. A copy of the suit is available here.

For some background, I recommend you read my June 18 column for The Kansas City Star. In short, I detail a city council session in which the city’s own consultants report that after reviewing seven years of contracting data, they could find no evidence to support the need for the city’s race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences. In fact, the consultancy’s director of research told the council bluntly, “You just don’t have the factual predicate” required to continue such set-asides.

What that really means is that the city has no defense against a lawsuit.

Members of the council were not pleased with the report’s findings. They could have viewed this as a huge victory for Kansas City—having reached a point where such discriminatory programs were no longer necessary. Instead, council members chose to question the results and the methodology. Mayor Lucas even offered a novel legal theory: “The courts suck.”

We know that column, the only reporting I have been able to find about the consultants’ report, played a role in Hanaway’s suit because she tells us so. Not only does the lawsuit track with what I wrote, including Lucas’s petulance, but she explicitly cites the column in the suit’s footnotes.

Following up on my column, on June 26, I spoke with Lee’s Summit–based civil rights attorney Jonathan Whitehead on KCMO Talk Radio’s Mundo in the Morning. Whitehead details the legal history regarding race- and sex-based discrimination, the rules it put in place for allowing such programs, and how the findings in Kansas City may put the city in legal jeopardy.

As with the Star column, you won’t find any such in-depth interviews on the topic anywhere else.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging race and sex discrimination against the Missouri State High School Activities Association (“MSHSAA”), and rightfully so, because if reports are correct, the MSHSAA’s rules are indeed discriminatory.

According to reporting from the Missouri Independent, MSHSAA’s rules require two of its 10 board members to be “candidates representing the underrepresented gender of the current board or an under-represented ethnicity.”

Supporters view the rule as a tool to promote fairness and inclusion.

It isn’t. The problem comes when a position becomes vacant. If eight of the remaining nine board members are all men or all white, for example, the rule would indicate that the candidate must be a woman or an underrepresented minority. This effectively bars candidates based on sex or ethnicity.

The Constitution protects individuals, not categories. However well intended, policies that distribute opportunity based on identity rather than merit raise immediate equal protection concerns. It demeans people to reduce them to nothing more than an identity marker, and it undermines government efficiency to exclude large numbers of candidates for a position because of their race or sex.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out in other contexts. In Arkansas, for example, a prospective member of a state licensing board was effectively barred from consideration because state law required the board to meet racial composition targets. He sued, and the Arkansas Legislature repealed the law. Lawmakers made clear what should have been obvious from the start: public appointments ought to be based on “experience and expertise, not the color of their skin.”

What remains to be determined is whether the MSHSAA is a public institution. It is organized as a private non-profit, but its employees are eligible for the Missouri state employees’ retirement system.

At its core, the matter can be reduced to whether institutions should discriminate based on sex or ethnicity. Given the MSHSAA’s broad mandate, it should not.

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