Right now, it is a close call whether the U of L men’s basketball team or Kentucky’s LGBTQ community has had the worst year. At least the woeful Cards won four games, the LGBTQ folks are still winless on the season.
What “season?” That would be the one in Frankfort where the Kentucky General Assembly is meeting and considering a tsunami of bills that attack, attack, attack people − including defenseless children − who happen to be homosexual or transgender, designations that are nobody’s public business.
I lobby for the Fairness Campaign, the advocacy group that is attempting to contain the carnage. We might as well try to turn back the sea. Every week, our team has triage meetings to decide which anti-gay measure is worse than another in order to schedule appearances to offer testimony in opposition.
I wish I could blame both political parties for this cataclysm but I cannot. Every anti-gay/trans bill this session was introduced by a Republican. But there’s hope. GOP state Reps. Kim Banta, Stephanie Dietz, Kim Moser, Killian Timoney and Sen. Stephen Meredith have voted this session against making LGBTQ Kentuckians second-class citizens.
Transgender children are the primary targets of the vendetta: what pronouns can be used to describe them in our public schools (I am not making this up), what medical care they can obtain, what psychological services they can have, what bathrooms the kids can use in a public school among other degradations.
Gay adults have been singled out for special humiliation by having to contend with a bill that addresses one of the commonwealth’s most critical problems: who can attend drag queen shows and where they can be performed; an artistic expression (dance) that threatens absolutely no one.
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Who exactly wants these punitive laws?
Apart from the ironically-named Family Foundation, not a single school superintendent, no medical professional, no parents, no one from a chapter of the Kiwanis, Rotary, FOP lodge, VFW post, the Knights of Columbus, Ducks Unlimited, or the Ancient Order of Hibernians has testified at any committee meeting to advocate for anti-gay/trans bills. NOBODY. Scores of people, representing professional and religious organizations or simply themselves, testify against these pernicious measures, but the bills still come flying out of committee like a field of horses sprung from the starting gate.
This is a contradictory look for pro-life Republican legislators who believe that all human life, born or pre-born, is sacred. One cannot simultaneously defend innocent life and demean the lives of our equally innocent gay sisters and brothers as nothing more than printed names on a birth certificate. As one of the co-founders of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The anti-gay blitzkrieg in Frankfort has metastasized due, in no small part, to the state GOP leadership’s deafening silence. Kentucky’s U.S. Sens., Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, have failed to denounce this anti-gay/transgender child abuse in the most explicit, unambiguous terms, remarks that would provide wise counsel for Republican legislators who look up to them.
Sen. McConnell didn’t hesitate a second when, in a speech for the ages, he condemned Donald Trump’s treasonous attempt to subvert the 2020 election. The longest serving U.S. Senate leader in American history should, well, lead, when human rights are being so egregiously threatened in our state Capitol.
Sen. Rand Paul champions “freedom” and “liberty” and keeping the heavy hand of government out of our lives. Does he really believe in maximizing individual freedom or is he “a clanging gong and a noisy cymbal” that tacitly condones a glaring exception based on sexual orientation?
Where are Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne? I know both gentlemen well; I served in the legislature with Robert and have known David from our association with horse racing. They are intelligent, honest, principled leaders as demonstrated by the fact that they have been elected and re-elected by their peers to the important positions they hold. No one will ever convince me that either man supports this bruising campaign of intimidation against a small minority of Kentuckians, not because of “who” the victims are but because of “what” they are. How will history judge them when these odious bills, if they become law, are eventually repealed as embarrassing anachronisms by a future Republican legislature?
For this aged history major, it always comes back to “what would Abraham Lincoln do?” In 1864, the President wrote in a letter to an editor in Frankfort that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” If codified discrimination against gay people/transgender children is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Whether a lawmaker is drafting a local, state or federal law, she should always ask herself, “Would I want this law to apply to my own family?” Will it treat any one affected by it “with malice toward none, with charity for all?”
Bob Heleringer, a Republican, served in Kentucky’s House of Representatives from 1980-2002. He can be reached at [email protected]
