Gerth: White Kentucky lawmaker says NAACP gathering ‘wasn’t a good faith meeting’

When I approached state Rep. Jennifer Decker just after she stepped off the elevator in the Kentucky Capitol last week, she became testy.

Decker, who is white, wasn’t angry with herself for saying something so preposterous as “my dad was a slave” while speaking to an NAACP group in Shelbyville a week earlier. She should have been.

But she was a little peeved at me for asking about it. She seemed maddest at whomever – she didn’t know who − provided the audio recording of her making such an insane claim.

Decker said she thought she was talking to friends but, in the end, she said, “this wasn’t a good faith discussion.”

That's a kind of odd complaint, being that so little in the Kentucky General Assembly is done in "good faith."

To her, this wasn’t about her saying something deeply offensive, likening the childhood chores her father did to 246 years of Black slavery in America. It was essentially about how dare someone share an audio recording of a politician speaking at a public meeting.

“This is how politics are now,” she said. “Gotcha and let’s exploit.”

The problem is, the meeting was never a “good faith discussion.”

A good faith discussion goes both ways. Decker was there to tell Black people what she was going to do to them.

“That was not a discussion, much less anything in ‘good faith,’” said Will Warner, a member of the activist group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth who gave me the recording of the meeting.

“She wasn’t there to help. … She was not there to ask for input from the NAACP or anyone individually on her bill. She was there to justify what she was doing,” he said.

This is part of the problem with Frankfort these days. The legislators sponsor bills without getting input and steadfastly refuse to make any changes to them, no matter what the testimony is and what the concerns are.

Take for instance, what happened with Senate Bill 6, the Senate version of the bill attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

During a hearing last Thursday, Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, said he had concerns about many things in the bill, but one simple and troubling thing was that it didn’t define things included in the legislation, such as a clause calling for “intellectual diversity.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” he said.

Sen. Mike Wilson, R-Bowling Green, the sponsor of the bill, promised “I would be open to further conversations and if that's something that you wanted to amend it on the floor, I would be open to that conversation.”

Of course, the Republicans refused to amend the bill, and terms used in it remain undefined.

It’s not just the diversity bills that Republican legislators handle without any real discussion and without public input that can actually cause the General Assembly to amend bills.

It used to be that the House Appropriations & Revenue Committee would meet numerous times to discuss the proposed budget, and dozens of state employees and private citizens with a rooting interest in which programs were funded and which weren’t, would testify.

This year, the committee met only once, for an hour and 54 minutes, before approving the budget in committee. The House passed the budget the next day, without giving legislators any opportunity to file amendments.

That wasn't handled in good faith.

When it came to Decker and her anti-diversity bill and what she thought would be “good faith discussions” with the NAACP, I asked if she had “good faith discussions” or any sort of conversations with the NAACP or groups like it before filing the bill that will affect African Americans more than anyone.

“No, I did not,” she said, before changing the subject to say that she had been invited to the NAACP meeting to explain the bill she filed.

When I asked why there had been no good faith conversations before she filed the bill, she stammered.

“There was a lot of good faith ….” She paused.

“It has, it has, actually ….” She paused again.

Then, she said something unintelligible, that sounded like, “When follow ….”  And she paused again.

“Thank you.”

And she walked away.

I'm not sure if she said that in good faith.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: White Kentucky lawmaker: NAACP gathering ‘wasn’t a good faith meeting’