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Sept. 5, 2006 | KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- On the last Sunday night in May, Mark Parkinson and his wife, Stacy, asked two of their best friends out to dinner at a country club in Cedar Creek, an exclusive planned community in the upscale Kansas suburbs southwest of Kansas City. They met Paul and Joyce Morrison in a private windowless room at the Shadow Glen golf course clubhouse because Mark had a secret he wanted to share with the other couple, something he needed the Morrisons to keep to themselves for 72 hours.
Parkinson, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party from 1999 to 2003, was planning to come out of the closet that Wednesday -- as a Democrat. At the request of incumbent Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, Parkinson would be switching his party registration and running as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.
As Parkinson remembers it, the Morrisons weren't shocked. The couples had been close for 20 years, close enough that Morrison was godfather to Parkinson's oldest child, and in recent years their private conversations had often turned to their growing disenchantment with the conservative direction of the state GOP.
"There's been a long series of Republican infighting over issues that do not affect people's daily lives," Parkinson explains. "I'm 49. I got tired of fighting about whether Charles Darwin was right when I was 14 or 15. I'm not spending the rest of my life on that issue."
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/05/sebelius/index.html?source=newsletter