Commentary
This is how we live.
LAWRENCEBURG — About the same time a person opened fire inside The Covenant School, a Christian elementary and preschool in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three nine-year-old children and three adults, I was sitting at a stoplight behind a blue Chevy truck with a bumper sticker that read, “No airbags. We die like real men.” That’s a […]
SB 150 will harm military families and their missions
No matter how you feel about trans health care, we can all agree that soldiers defending America’s interests abroad shouldn’t have additional, unnecessary worries about their families at home. That’s exactly what’s happening with the movement of Senate Bill 150. SB 150 is one of the most extreme attacks on transgender health that we’ve seen […]
Republican legislature overdoes it trying to trip up Democrat Beshear
For a few minutes on the ides of March, it seemed the legislature was really legislating. Faced with a transgender-youth bill that ignored medical advice, the state Senate did a rare thing in this era of tight partisan control: It voted on a substantive floor amendment, and wonder of wonders, narrowly passed it. The amendment […]
Child care — the ‘workforce behind the workforce’ — is in crisis in Kentucky
Kentucky lawmakers, concerned that the state has half the workers it needs, cut unemployment benefits to force those who lose jobs to get back to work quicker and set up a program to get ex-inmates directly from prisons into jobs. But a direct, long-overdue way to beef up the workforce would be to provide affordable […]
Can’t find the word? Try ‘bigotry’
In the penultimate courtroom scene in 1993’s “Philadelphia,” Denzel Washington’s character demands the court acknowledge the subject they have danced uncomfortably around throughout the trial. “Your honor, everybody in this courtroom is thinking about sexual orientation, sexual preference, whatever you want to call it,” he says. “Who does what to whom and how they do […]
Shorting state workers’ pay hurts us all
Last year, the General Assembly provided the first meaningful raise to workers in state government in 14 years by providing an 8% cost of living adjustment. Though that increase was welcome, and helped keep state employees from feeling the worst inflation in decades, it was not nearly enough to correct a decade and a half […]
Hammering in the Kentucky hills with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
The lively young girl was excited about her brand-new home, as well she should be. It had been built in a miraculous five hot and sometimes rainy days, by a gang of friendly volunteers with Habitat for Humanity. She was showing me what would soon be her very own room. Telling me where she planned […]
As threats to open government in Kentucky keep multiplying, it’s hard to celebrate
I will not celebrate Sunshine Week 2023. Since leaving the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office in 2016, I have pursued open government as an avocation rather than a vocation. I have come to understand the importance of Sunshine Week as an annual celebration of public records laws securing the public’s right to know how their elected […]
No-compromise culture war has ruined our politics
When the Kentucky House voted to ban gender-affirming medical treatment for Kentucky minors, even if their parents want them to have such care, it illustrated what’s wrong with our politics and with the Kentucky General Assembly. Medical science and wisdom are ignored, and the legislative process is abused, all for political expediency. The loudest and […]
Kentucky should decriminalize fentanyl test strips to protect unwitting users and first responders
“We’ve never seen one drug this prevalent in the toxicology reports of overdose fatalities.” Those were the words of Van Ingram executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. A record high 2,250 Kentuckians died from drug overdoses in 2021, a 14.5% increase compared with the year prior. Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, […]
Demands by protesters and Breonna Taylor’s family helped expose the rot in Louisville policing
The fallout of the 2020 Breonna Taylor killing by police, resulting from an invalid warrant, made clear that the Louisville police department has serious problems in management and training. But a two-year federal investigation into the department exposed the depth of the bullying and overall disrespect toward citizens. Attorney General Merrick Garland rightly described the […]
In the room when politics tries to erase people
Five days before Christmas, I was in an Anderson County government meeting I had been attending regularly for a year and a half. We stood for the prayer. We pledged allegiance to the American and Kentucky flags. The meeting was called to order. As elected officials made motions and went through basic procedure to approve […]