White slavery and other Frankfort dingbattery as seen from afar in just one week | Opinion

Last week, my husband and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary by taking a trip to Mexico. I tried to completely unplug, but I peeked at social media now and then to keep up.

That gave me a bird’s eye view of Kentucky and its peerless leaders at work in Frankfort.

And all I can say is, Jesus wept.

Looking from afar provides the Cliff’s Notes version of dingbattery, tomfoolery and buffoonery that defines our governing bodies. No wonder the rest of the world looks down on us. No wonder we can’t get ahead in education, health or economics.

It’s both deeply hilarious and tragically sad.

Here’s just a few of the things that happened in one week:

▪ Rep. Jennifer Decker decided to catapult Kentucky back into national headlines by proclaiming that her father, a tenant farmer, was in fact a “white slave.”

This, mind you, was in a speech to a local NAACP chapter about why it’s great that Decker is trying to eviscerate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts at our colleges and universities. Boy, would you have loved to see the audience’s facial expressions with this one? Decker, one of the leaders in the charge to harm transgender children last year, just keeps on humiliating herself and embarrassing the rest of us.

Suggestion: maybe get a primer on Black history, enslavement, basic humanity, anything that will help you understand the world a little better.

▪ But then Rep. Phillip Pratt said, “Hold my beer,” and pushed his bill loosening restrictions on child labor laws. His reasoning, according to reporter Austin Horn, “is that that allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work a potentially unlimited number of hours is “no different” than letting them dedicate a lot of time to sports, student clubs or volunteering. He also said that workforce participation has declined precipitously among those aged 17 to 25, and that House Bill 255 will “hopefully help with that.”

Yes, taking teenagers away from their school activities will help people like Pratt, who owns a landscaping business. But it will not really help Kentucky’s workforce labor issues, which needs better educated high school graduates who can work in our emerging advanced manufacturing sector. I guess explaining that to Pratt would be akin to explaining to Decker why her father was not a slave.

▪ Legislators have expressed concerns over a lack of affordable housing and the urgent need to turn homeless people into criminals. So, they are working on legislation that will ensure more homeless people and blocks the local control they used to love: Prohibiting cities like Lexington and Louisville to ban source of income discrimination, which hurts our most marginalized citizens trying to find housing with such help as Section 8 vouchers.

▪ Yes, our legislators work to make our biggest problems worse, but they always have time for the completely unnecessary, too. Rep. David Hale, who swears this is not about removing Confederate President and U.S. traitor Jefferson Davis from the Capitol Rotunda, filed a bill to require legislative approval over this executive branch function. Can Rep. Decker make room for Rep. Hale in the remedial history room?

▪ Then there was the most potentially serious legislation, House Bill 509, which would have basically killed Kentucky’s Open Records Act by redefining what a public record is. This turned into a feel-good story about participatory government when progressive and conservative activists rose up en masse to fight it, and Rep. John Hodgson agreed to rewrite. But why do we have to have such ignorant threats to democracy every single year?

All this happened in just one week!

Meanwhile, there are good bills out there that may or may not make it even though they should: Sen. Whitney Westerfield’s bill on guns and mental health crises, Rep. Kim Moser’s “Momnibus” bill on maternal health and Sen. Dannny Carroll’s bill to improve childcare and early childhood education. These legislators are all Republicans, and pretty consistently, the adults in the rooms of the Capitol that desperately needs more of them.