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Proper now, it is a shut name whether or not the U of L males’s basketball crew or Kentucky’s LGBTQ neighborhood is having the worst yr ever. No less than the heartbreaking Playing cards received 4 video games, the LGBTQ guys are nonetheless winless on the season.
What is the climate?” It will be in Frankfort where the Kentucky General Assembly is meeting and considering a tsunami of bills that attack, attack, attack people — including defenseless children — who are gay. or are transgender, designations that are nobody’s public business.
i lobby fairness campaign, an advocacy group attempting to stop the genocide. We can also try to turn back the sea. Each week, our team held triage meetings to decide which anti-gay measure was worse than the other in order to make appearances to testify in opposition.
I wish I could blame both the political parties for this catastrophe but I cannot. Every anti-gay/trans bill this session was introduced by a Republican. But there is hope. GOP State Representatives Kim Banta, Stephanie Dietz, Kim Moser, Killian Timoney and Sen. Stephen Meredith have voted against making LGBTQ Kentuckians second-class citizens this session.
Transgender children are primary targets of retaliation: what pronouns can be used to describe them in our public schools (I’m not making this up), what medical care they can receive, what psychological services they can. Can get, what kids can make bathrooms use in a public school, among other degradations.
Gay adults have been singled out for special humiliation, to contend with a bill addressing one of the Commonwealth’s most pressing problems: who can participate in drag queen shows and where they can be performed; An artistic expression (dance) that doesn’t scare anyone.
Are there not more pressing issues?:Tennessee Republicans take aim at America’s greatest threat: drag shows
Who Really Wants These Punitive Laws?
apart from the irony-name Family Foundation, not a single school superintendent, not a medical professional, not a parent, anyone from a chapter of Kiwanis, Rotary, FOP Lodge, VFW post, Knights of Columbus, Ducks Unlimited, or The Ancient Order of Hibernians Has not testified at committee meeting to advocate for anti-gay/trans bills. None. Scores of people, representing professional and religious organizations or simply themselves, testify against these harmful measures, but bills still come flying out of committee like a field of horses sprung from the starting gate.
This is a stark contrast to pro-life Republican legislators, who hold that all human life, birth or prebirth, is sacred. One cannot simultaneously protect the innocent lives and lives of our equally innocent gay sisters and brothers as nothing more than the names printed on birth certificates. Abraham Lincoln, one of the co-founders of the Republican Party, said, “A home divided in opposition to itself can not.”
The anti-gay storm in Frankfurt has metastasized due, in no small part, to the deafening silence of the state GOP leadership. That US Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky have failed to condemn this anti-gay/transgender child abuse in the plainest, clearest terms would provide wise counsel for Republican legislators who see them.
Sen. McConnell didn’t hesitate for a second when, in a speech for the ages, he denounced Donald Trump’s treasonous attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The leader of the longest serving US Senate in American history should lead when human rights are at such a great risk in our state capitol.
Sen. Rand Paul champions “liberty” and “liberty” and keeping the heavy hand of government out of our lives. Does he really believe in maximizing individual liberty or is he “a clanging gong and a loud cymbal” tacitly accepting an explicit exception based on sexual orientation?
Where are Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne? I know both gentlemen very well; I served in the legislature with Robert and know David from our association with horse racing. They are intelligent, honest, principled leaders as demonstrated by the fact that they hold important positions elected and re-elected by their peers. No one will ever convince me that either man supports this campaign of intimidation against a small minority of Kentuckians, not because of who the “victims” are but “what”. How will history judge them when these loathsome bills become law, only to be ultimately repealed by a future Republican legislature as shameful malpractice?
For this aging history major, it’s always been “What would Abraham Lincoln do?” In 1864 the president wrote in a letter to a Frankfurt editor that “if slavery will not be incorrect, nothing is incorrect.” If codified discrimination against gay people/transgender children is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Whether a legislator is drafting a local, state, or federal law, he or she should always ask themselves, “Do I would like this legislation to use to my circle of relatives?” Will it treat anyone affected by it with “malice in direction of none, charity for all?”
Bob Hellinger, a Republican, served within the Kentucky Home of Representatives from 1980–2002. He will be reached at helringr@bellsouth.web.
