Sarah Ladd, Kentucky Lantern

In his final address as president of the American Medical Association, Kentucky’s Dr. Bruce A. Scott called on the medical community to turn its “anger into action” to protect the medical safety net now under threat in Congress.

Scott, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Louisville, closed out his term as president of the AMA by slamming insurance denials and Republican proposals in Congress that he said threaten the future of medicine.

“The same House bill that brings us closer to finally tying future Medicare payment to the rising cost of running our practices also takes a step backwards by limiting access to care for millions of low income Americans,” Scott said. “Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are literal lifelines for children and families for whom subsidized health coverage is the only real option.”

He added: “We must do all we can to protect the safety net and continue to educate lawmakers on how best to target waste and fraud in a system without making it tougher for vulnerable populations to access care.”

In late May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the controversial spending and tax package, dubbed the “big, beautiful bill” by President Donald Trump who supports the measure. Many health advocates are warning it will hurt hospitals and patients. The bill, which is now in the hands of the Senate, proposes deep cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for almost 1 in 3 Kentuckians’ health care.

The AMA is working “to target the Senate as we work for improvements in this bill,” Scott said.

He called for more legislative advocacy, saying that “the times call for some anger” but “we can channel that anger into positive action.”

Among other things, Inside Higher Education reports that the bill could “entirely reshape the student loan system.” This, Scott said during his farewell address to the AMA House of Delegates Friday in Chicago, complicates the future for an already dwindling physician workforce.

The proposed lending practices in the bill would make medical education “virtually unaffordable for many students,” he said, calling that “simply unconscionable.” Kentucky has a well-documented physician shortage. The Kentucky Medical Association reports that most counties don’t have enough primary care providers.

“Our nation should be working to bring down the cost of medical education, not erecting barriers that defer brilliant young minds from pursuing this noble profession,” he said.

Meanwhile, Scott said, “our patience is being tested by this new administration and Congress.”

“Despite all the efforts of everyone in this room and our colleagues across the country, our health care system is failing in fundamental ways. It’s failing physicians and, more importantly, it is failing our patients,” Scott said. “I’m angry because the dysfunction in health care today goes hand in hand with years of dysfunction in Congress. Physicians are bearing the brunt of a failed Medicare payment system, and while our pay has been cut 33% in 25 years, we see hospitals and even insurance companies receiving annual increases. Congress needs to know that there is no ‘care’ in Medicare if there are no doctors.”

In addition to federal policy, Scott criticized insurance companies that deny doctor-recommended care. He said he recently had a patient with a large tumor pushing into her eye that he needed to remove surgically. Her insurance provider initially denied the procedure, recommending “an antibiotic and a steroid nasal spray” first.

“Are you kidding me?” Scott said. “An antibiotic and a nasal spray to treat her tumor? Without seeing the patient, without talking to the patient, without completing even one single semester of medical school, this insurance representative determined that she knew more than the patient’s doctor.”

Such denials lead to confusion and stress for patients, Scott said, and frustration for doctors that eventually “become too much to overcome” and force people to leave the profession.

This, he said, is “a system that is undermining our judgment and eroding our patients’ trust.”

“What insurance companies are doing to our patients is wrong,” Scott said. “Stepping between us and our patients is wrong. Denying necessary and even life saving care is just plain wrong.”

Scott’s term as AMA president ends Tuesday. Michigan’s Dr. Bobby Mukkamala was elected as his successor last year.

LOUISVILLE — Kentucky Right to Life is endorsing in fewer legislative races this year — 45 candidates for the General Assembly received an endorsement from the anti-abortion group, down from 86 in 2022 and 88 in 2020.

Addia Wuchner, Kentucky Right to Life executive director, did not respond to a voicemail and email from the Lantern last week.

Planned Parenthood’s Tamarra Wieder said the decrease in endorsements is a sign that Kentucky politicians no longer want to take the unpopular stands required to win a Right to Life endorsement.

Wieder, state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Kentucky, said it’s an “incredible indictment on the brand and on the movement.”

“What this shows is that they have become too extreme, even for their followers,” Wieder said. “They are out of step with Kentuckians, and I think it also shows the legislature is afraid of putting their name on anti-abortion policies.”

In order to be considered for an endorsement, the Kentucky Right to Life Victory PAC requires candidates to answer questions about issues important to the group and sign the survey. The organization also considers voting record, a candidate’s involvement in organizations related to abortion, electability and background.

In 2024, about 50 Republican candidates “declined” to answer the survey, according to the endorsement report. Right to Life endorsed 45 legislative candidates and “recommended” others based on their voting history.

All 100 House seats and half of the 38 Senate seats are on the ballot every two years, although many seats go uncontested.

The Lantern used information from VoteSmart to count endorsements from earlier elections; Kentucky Right to Life Victory PAC’s voter guides from prior elections are not posted on its website.

It’s unclear if everyone marked as “declined” this year received the survey.

Although endorsed by Right to Life at times in the past, the top Republicans in both chambers of the legislature are not endorsed this year. Among those listed as declining to answer the group’s questions: Senate President Robert Stivers, House Speaker David Osborne, Senate President Pro Tem David Givens and Speaker Pro Tem David Meade.

Other prominent Republicans listed as declining to respond are House Majority Floor Leader Steven Rudy and Senate budget committee chairman Chris McDaniel.

All of them were still recommended by Right to Life based on their voting records.

A Senate GOP spokesperson said Stivers and Givens “agree that their voting record speaks for itself.”

No Democrats answered the Right to Life survey this year and none were endorsed.

Candidates wary of surveys in general

Political considerations about abortion changed after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federally-guaranteed right to abortion in 2022. The ruling allowed a near-total abortion ban that Republican lawmakers had already put on the books to take effect in Kentucky. It has no exceptions for victims of rape or incest and a narrow exception to protect the life of a pregnant patient.

Morgan Eaves, the executive director of the Kentucky Democratic Party, said the decline in candidates taking the Right to Life survey shows that “Kentucky Republicans know that their extreme anti-choice and zero exceptions policy is unpopular, and that’s why they’re running away from it now.”

Republicans, however, gave little sign of backing off the abortion ban during this year’s legislative session. Although lawmakers of both parties sponsored bills to loosen abortion restrictions, none of the measures made any headway. Bills protecting in vitro fertilization also failed to advance, after the temporary suspension of the fertility treatment in Alabama stirred a political storm.

Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state, was reluctant to say if the decline in GOP candidates responding to the Right to Life survey signaled a rift with the organization. Candidates, he said, have become more wary of surveys in general. Advocacy interest groups are trying to advance an agenda and elect people who are part of their causes, Grayson said. A lawmaker seeking reelection recently complained to him about “gotcha” questions on candidate surveys.

Challengers are more likely to respond to surveys, Grayson said, while incumbents can point to their voting records, floor speeches and websites.

‘ … not that much more to give’

Last year Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear used the abortion ban to his advantage against Republican challenger Daniel Cameron. Cameron had been endorsed by Right to Life but waffled on abortion after Beshear aired ads attacking him as extreme for opposing rape and incest exceptions. (Kentuckian Hadley Duvall, who spoke in a Beshear ad about being impregnated by her stepfather when she was 12, is now playing a prominent role in the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.)

The year before, in November 2022, Kentuckians had defeated an anti-abortion constitutional amendment that Republicans put on the ballot before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Republican strategist Tres Watson, a former spokesperson for the Republican Party of Kentucky, said it’s not Republican politicians who have changed but Right to Life. Having gained its long-time goal of outlawing abortion in Kentucky, the organization is “continuing to ask for more when there’s just not that much more to give.”

“I think that the leadership over there needs to reconsider their relationship with candidates and with the legislature if they want to continue to be an influencer in Frankfort,” Watson said of the group.

Tres Watson

Weider of Planned Parenthood said the Right to Life questionnaire “is more extreme than ever.”

Watson said he thinks Republican lawmakers support adding exceptions for rape and incest to the abortion ban. “I think that if you were to remove elections from the equation, I think that an exceptions bill would pass easily among Republicans,” Watson said. “But I think that the threat of Kentucky Right to Life coming out and attempting to make pro-life legislators appear to be pro-abortion liberals is preventing that from passing.”

Watson said when he worked for the state Republican Party candidates were advised not to respond to a survey from Northern Kentucky Right to Life “because it asked you to take extreme positions that didn’t sit well with independent voters and center right Republicans.”

IVF among the questions

Kentucky Right to Life’s 2024 questionnaire asks candidates about their support for maintaining a ban on assisted suicide, banning mail-in abortion pills, adding a “Human Life” amendment to the U.S. Constitution to include “all human beings, born and unborn” and more. It highlights issues surrounding in vitro fertilization in which unused frozen embryos are discarded.

Questions included:

If you are in a position to do so, would you advocate, support, sign into law and/or defend against legislation that would permit the cloning of human embryos or laboratory-created life for the purpose of the harvesting their stem cells for research or therapeutic cloning? (procedures requiring the creation and destruction of human lives)

Do you believe that embryos created through IVF (in vitro fertilization) should be protected as all other lives?

Do you believe medical schools and nursing programs operating in conjunction with universities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky that receive state funding should have mechanisms in place such as conscience exceptions that permit students to be excused from participating in specific curricular activities and training, i.e. abortion procedures that violate the student’s religious or ethical beliefs?

Are you morally and/or medically opposed to chemical abortions, such as RU-486, the abortion pill, and other drugs known to prevent the newly created human being from attaching (implantation) to his/her mother’s womb or medications that cause the woman’s body to expel her developing child in the early stages of her pregnancy?

Do you agree that the personal protection afforded to every member of the human race under the Fourteenth Amendment should be extended equally to the preborn?

Eaves, the Kentucky Democratic Party chief, said most Kentuckians and Americans “believe in some form of pro-choice policy.”

Is IVF protected in Kentucky? Depends on whom you ask.

In May, the Pew Research Center reported that 63% of Americans “say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.”

Gallup polling also shows the majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in certain cases.

Additionally, 54% of those surveyed by Gallup in May considered themselves “pro choice” and 41% considered themselves “pro life,” the largest gap since 1995.

Weider of Planned Parenthood said the effects of the abortion ban on health care, especially for people who are experiencing miscarriages or nonviable pregnancies, will continue to push politicians away from Right to Life.

“You are starting to see pushback on what was once, I would say, a badge of honor for the majority of conservative politicians in Kentucky,” she said. “And I think it is an indictment on what has happened to Kentucky and health care. And we are seeing the daily fallout.”

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and X.

If you or someone you know has experienced domestic violence, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. You can also contact any of Kentucky’s 15 domestic violence programs.

This story also discusses suicide. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.

Georgia Hensley feels like she’s been “screaming in a padded room” for too long about gaps in the way Kentucky protects survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence.

Now that two women are dead in her town, “suddenly there’s two or three people at the tiny window on the door” listening to those concerns, said Hensley, the CEO of SpringHaven, which helps survivors of intimate partner violence in Kentucky’s Lincoln Trail District.

“It truly has been like begging for help and no one was listening … and that’s abhorrent,” Hensley said. “It should not take the death of a woman and her mother and the severe injury of her father for all of us to begin talking about the issues that we needed to be discussing anyway.”

A month after a woman and her mother were gunned down in the parking lot of the courthouse in Elizabethtown on the day of her emergency protective order (EPO) hearing, advocates who work to end intimate partner violence told the Lantern the state can and should do more to protect survivors.

That includes, they say, passing a Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention Orders (CARR) bill, which would establish a process for temporarily removing guns from people at risk of hurting themselves or others. In other words, a “red flag” law.

In 1994, Congress barred anyone who is subject to a domestic violence protective order — or who has been convicted of the crime of domestic violence — from possessing or buying a gun or ammunition. The United States Supreme Court upheld that law this year, saying it is constitutional to disarm a person in those circumstances.

Kentucky is not among the 32 states that have enacted their own laws and protocols to separate domestic abusers from guns, even temporarily. As a result, protection for victims varies across the state, said Darlene Thomas, the executive director of GreenHouse17, a Fayette County-based nonprofit working to end intimate partner violence.

The violent deaths in Elizabethtown, Hensley says, should spur action.

“The community is enraged,” she said. “Citizens are enraged. And our officials need to be listening.”

Georgia Hensley, CEO of SpingHaven, Inc., outside the Hardin County Justice Center in Elizabethtown. (Austin Anthony for the Kentucky Lantern)

What happened in Elizabethtown?

In early August, Erica Riley asked the court system to protect her from a man with whom, police say, she’d had a relationship.

A judge granted her request, issuing an emergency protective order (EPO) on Aug. 8 and scheduling a hearing to consider extending the order.

On the morning of the hearing, Aug. 19, Riley arrived at the Elizabethtown courthouse, family by her side.

The man in question, Christopher Elder, 46, was there too.

Jeremy Thompson, the Elizabethtown police chief, said that Elder shot Riley and two others in an “ambush type style” in the parking lot right before 9 a.m., when the hearing was scheduled.

Riley died there, police say, the day before she was to turn 38.

Her mother, Janet, later died at the hospital, police say. Erica Riley’s father was also injured and hospitalized, but has since been released, according to a police spokesman.

Within hours of the shooting, police publicly named Elder as their suspect. He led police on a multi-county, 100-mile car chase. After a standoff in a parking lot in Christian County with at least nine first responder agencies, he shot himself at 11:15 CST, according to Kentucky State Police.

Elder was airlifted to Vanderbilt Hospital and died that day.

Domestic violence, guns a lethal combination

The outside of the Hardin County Justice Center in Elizabethtown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

While the Elizabethtown shooting got widespread attention, the key details aren’t uncommon.

The majority of murder-suicides (62%) in the United States have an intimate partner component, the nonprofit Violence Policy Center said in a 2023 report.

Almost all of those — 95% — were a man killing a woman and 93% of those involved a gun.

Most female homicide victims were killed by a current or former male partner, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine last year.

That same research showed victims of intimate partner violence are five times more likely to die if their abuser has access to a gun — and 1 in 8 convicted perpetrators of intimate partner violence admit they used a gun to threaten someone.

In 2022, about half of Kentucky women — 45.3% — and around 35.5% of men had experienced intimate partner violence — or threat of it — in their lifetimes, the Lantern has reported. In 2023, that number decreased to 44.5% of women and 32.9% of men.

When police respond to a domestic violence or adjacent situation, they are required to file a form called a JC-3. Of the roughly 41,000 Kentucky JC-3s filed in 2023, 97 involved a gun.

Hundreds more — 399 — involved terroristic threatening.

Research shows when abusive partners have access to guns, they’re more likely to kill. A 2023 paper published in the National Library of Medicine found victims were five times more likely to die when a firearm is involved.

Advocates who work to end intimate partner violence told the Lantern that Kentucky needs a way to remove weapons from the hands of domestic violence perpetrators.

Unfunded mandate

Downtown Elizabethtown (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Even though the Supreme Court says it’s constitutional to disarm people who are the subject of domestic violence protective orders, that’s basically an “unfunded mandate” in Kentucky, said Thomas with GreenHouse17.

“Our systems throughout the commonwealth are having to figure out who gets them, who collects them, who stores them, who marks them for storage,” she explained. “How do people get them back? When do they get them back? What’s the process for people to get their weapons back when they’ve been removed?”

There’s no funding in Kentucky to carry out the federal law, Thomas said, which results in an uneven application across the state.

“Some courts will sometimes ask the sheriffs to go confiscate the weapons. Sometimes they’ll tell a person, ‘you have to turn those weapons over to your attorney or to the sheriff’s department,’” she said. “All the systems are a little different by how they do it, but the federal law says they have authority to help see that weapons are not in the hands of abusers, right? How they go about doing that can look very different county to county, judge to judge, situation to situation.”

Based on existing laws, any firearm Elder had “should have been removed from his possession at the time he was served,” said Hensley, who is also an attorney.

It’s unclear if the gun used in the August shooting was registered to the suspect. No official information about the gun and how it was obtained is available, a police spokesman told the Lantern.

“The way that most sheriff’s departments serve those petitions and request for firearms is simply … they’ll knock on the door, (say), ‘Here you go, sir. Do you have any firearms in the house?’ And if the perpetrator says, ‘No,’ that’s it,” Hensley explained.

Whether or not a police officer has the legal ability to enter the home and search for those weapons is a complicated question, Hensley said. “I would probably argue, as an attorney: no,” she said.

One exception could be if the petitioner told authorities that the alleged perpetrator did have access to weapons.

Still, she said: “truthfully, that’s an uphill legal battle. They would really need to obtain a warrant or see something.”

Leaving is dangerous. It doesn’t need to happen alone.

Leaving an abusive situation — when it’s often most dangerous for survivors — is difficult, but doesn’t have to happen alone.

In Elizabethtown, Hensley organized a court escort volunteer service after Riley’s death.

“I don’t have any faith in the legislature or in our leadership to get that done, so I’ve done it,” she said. “And is that something that a nonprofit should be forced to do? Probably not. But is it something that we’re going to do? Yeah, it is. It is because safety is the most important thing.”

Still, survivors sometimes must enter a courthouse or go through a door at the same time as an abuser or sit together in a waiting area, advocates say.

Angela Yannelli

But there are simple — and inexpensive — solutions to those physical barriers, said Angela Yannelli, the CEO of ZeroV (formerly known as the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence), such as bringing in the parties at different times and through different entrances and having a designated space for petitioners to wait separate from respondents.

It’s also currently up to a judge’s discretion if they hold domestic hearings over Zoom, Hensley said.

But it’s a policy she says the General Assembly should codify.

Doing so could lessen some of the physical stress of a hearing, she said. But, there are downsides.

“These cases can often be difficult to determine, and so much of it is based on body language and … a determination of who you believe,” she said. “And some of that is very difficult to do via Zoom.”

While there are safety gaps, the state has a lot working in its favor: a robust network of violence prevention programs and researched-backed primary prevention, which involves educating children and other community members about intimate partner violence, said Christy Burch, the CEO of the ION Center for violence prevention in Northern Kentucky.

“There’s barriers to staying. There’s barriers to leaving,” Burch said. “When I think about that preparation to leaving or making a big change there, reach out to your local program. We are here. You don’t have to walk that journey alone.”

Could a red flag law help?

Sen. Whitney Westerfield, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored CARR in 2024 but he’s leaving the Republican-controlled legislature after deciding not to run for reelection this year.

His co-sponsors for CARR were all Democrats. One of them, Louisville Sen. David Yates, is “working to build support from colleagues in the Senate to carry the bill with him” in 2025, a Senate Democrats spokesman said.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports that people dealing with suicidality are more likely to live if they lose access to guns and other “lethal means” temporarily, until intense feelings pass. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.

Aurora Vasquez is the vice president of state policy and engagement with Sandy Hook Promise.

Aurora Vasquez, the vice president of State Policy & Engagement with Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit that works to end gun violence, said temporary removal is key to “defuse the situation.”

“It’s often painted as though CARR is producing a permanent loss of Second Amendment rights,” she said.

But the goal with CARR, she said, is to “give people help in the moment they need it most, so that they don’t lose their Second Amendment rights.”

“We can’t collectively as a society — and Kentucky certainly should not, given that it has a robust gun culture — should not look away from the fact that gun owners sometimes need help, and it’s okay,” Vasquez said. “As human beings, we all sometimes need help, right? Being a firearm owner does not exclude us from that.”

There’s no way to know if CARR could have saved Erica Riley’s life, Yannelli said.

“What we do know is that getting firearms out of the hands of an abuser will save lives,” she said.

Thomas with GreenHouse17 agreed.

“Weapons escalate situations and not deescalate them,” she said. “I think CARR protections … would help our law enforcement and our communities feel a little safer with temporary gun removal for somebody that’s experiencing an episode of some kind.”

A memorial where Erica Riley and her mother were shot in August in the parking lot of the Hardin County Justice Center. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and X.

This story mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.

Calling it a “dangerous practice,” Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order Wednesday that bans conversion therapy on minors in Kentucky.

Speaking in Frankfort, Beshear said such attempts to alter a young person’s gender expression or sexual attractions have “no basis in medicine” — a view supported by experts in medicine and mental health.

Conversion therapy has been condemned by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), among other medical and psychological organizations. AACAP says conversion therapies “lack scientific credibility and clinical utility” and “there is evidence that such interventions are harmful.”

The practice involves “interventions purported to alter same-sex attractions or an individual’s gender expression with the specific aim to promote heterosexuality as a preferable outcome” according to the AACAP.

The American Psychological Association says that people who have undergone “sexual orientation change efforts” are much more likely to be depressed and suicidal. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.

Beshear’s executive order states that neither state or federal dollars can be used “for the practice of conversion therapy on minors.”

“Today’s action does not force an ideology on anybody,” Beshear said. “It does not expose anyone to anything in a library or school. It simply stops a so-called ‘therapy’ that the medical community says is wrong and hurts our children.”

Rep. Lisa Willner

Beshear’s order comes after Rep. Lisa Willner, D-Louisville, has repeatedly sponsored legislation to ban conversion therapy in Kentucky. Each year, her bill has had bipartisan support. Given that, it’s always been a “mystery” to her why it didn’t pass, she told the Lantern Wednesday.

“That’s a question I’ve asked myself for six years: Why can’t we get this across the finish line?” she said. “It’s such a discredited practice. It has caused such harm to so many young Kentuckians, including suicide. And it has had such strong bipartisan support.”

“I’m incredibly grateful for the executive order, and that, at long last, there will be protections in place,” Willner added.

Snags in 2025?

Beshear’s move could hit snags in the 2025 legislative session.

Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, wrote on social media that he would file legislation next year to “stop this governor from pushing his harmful far-left agenda on struggling kids.”

Rep. Josh Calloway

Calloway shared a screenshot of the email the governor’s office sent to announce the executive order and wrote, “why is @AndyBeshearKY determined to keep vulnerable children confused?”

“I will fight this with every fiber of my being,” Calloway wrote. “I am also exploring other legal options to stop egregious overreach.”

Willner is “sure there will be efforts” to block the executive order, she told the Lantern.

“There are people who, I think, willfully misunderstand what this is about, and that this is a practice that traumatizes people for decades, for the rest of their lives, and that ends lives prematurely,” she said. “And for people to misunderstand this is beyond disappointing. I will do everything I can to make sure that any efforts to turn this back will fail, and I really hope that they will.”

Protections ‘at long last’

Advocates for mental health in Kentucky praised Beshear’s action.

Sheila Schuster, the executive director of the Kentucky Mental Health Coalition, called the practice “torture” and teared up as she spoke alongside Beshear in the Capitol Rotunda.

Sheila Schuster, executive director of the Kentucky Mental Health Coalition, likened conversion therapy to “torture.” (Governor’s office)

Her coalition has listed ending conversion therapy as a top priority for the legislature for nearly a decade, citing the “harm” the practice causes.

“While we have not been successful in the legislature, it’s not for lack of effort from our heroines and heroes,” Schuster said.

Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, said Beshear would “save countless Kentucky kids’ lives” with the move.

“Today, we all join Governor Beshear to send a crystal clear message to all of Kentucky’s queer kids and their families,” Hartman said. “You are perfect as you are.”

Eric Russ, the executive director of the Kentucky Psychological Association, called conversion therapy a discredited practice that “has no place in the mental health care of LGBTQ youth.”

“We know that survivors of conversion therapy not only do not change their sexual orientation, but have worse mental health outcomes, including self blame, guilt, shame, anxiety, depression,” Russ said. “We know the best thing we can do as mental health providers is to affirm the identity of the kids in our care. When a kid walks into a licensed mental health professional’s office with their family, we have an ethical obligation to provide them care that is supportive, evidence based and affirming to their sexual orientation identity.”

The ceremonial signing was held in the state Capitol Rotunda as Gov. Andy Beshear issued a ban on conversion therapy. (Governor’s office)

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and X.

Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission voted in favor of spending $3.6 million over the next two years on a three-part addiction prevention campaign geared toward youth proposed by Attorney General Russell Coleman Tuesday.

The funds that the commission is in charge of distributing, which come from legal settlements with drug companies, “represent the shared pain of families across this commonwealth,” Coleman said Tuesday.

He asked the commission for permission to spend a slice of this “blood money” to reach young people across Kentucky between the ages of 13 and 26. No members voted against his request, and no one abstained. The money will be split into $1.8 million each year.

Coleman’s campaign, modeled after a Florida initiative, has three parts. The first is an ad campaign called Better Without It, to be featured on social media, on college campuses and more. Coleman pointed to the well-known “Click it or ticket” campaign as an example that “these types of education campaigns can work.”

The ads, which will also be pushed by influencers, will be tailored to Kentucky, using photographers and creators who Coleman said can make the material “look and sound and feel and smell like the commonwealth.”

The second arm of the campaign is to “weave together” Kentucky’s “patchwork” of school-based prevention programs so kids have access to more cohesive resources. Lastly, Coleman said, the campaign will “elevate and draw attention to the ongoing work of this commission.”

Overdose deaths in Kentucky decreased in 2023 for the second year in a row, according to this year’s Drug Overdose Fatality Report. In 2022, 2,135 Kentuckians died from an overdose, marking the first decline since 2018. Ninety percent of those deaths were from opioids and fentanyl.

In 2023, the number of fatal overdoses was down to 1,984. Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, accounted for 1,570 of those — about 79% of the 2023 deaths. The 35-44 age group was most at risk, the report shows. Methamphetamine accounted for 55% of 2023’s overdose deaths.

From 2021 to 2023, around 460 Kentuckians under the age of 34 died from overdoses, according to that report.

“We know young people are more likely to be influenced by their peers than (by) someone who looks like me,” Coleman said. “Honest and productive conversations about the dangers of substance abuse among students can be a force multiplier.”

People in their teens and early 20s and those with a family history of addiction are most at risk for opioid use disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“I’m asking you to zealously collaborate with us so that we can reach young people where they are to prevent them from taking their first — and in this environment, too oftentimes their last — experimentation … with this poison,” Coleman told commission members.

Coleman said “as little as one fentanyl pill can — and is — killing our neighbors. … We live at a time where there is no margin of error. It simply does not exist. There’s no such thing as safe, no such concept or notion of safe experimentation with narcotics.”

The commission was created by the state legislature in 2021 and has nine voting and two non-voting members.

Kentucky receives installments toward $900 million in settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors. So far, it has awarded 110 grants worth more than $55 million toward treatment, prevention and recovery efforts.

The commission next meets on Oct. 8.

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and X.

A conservative legal group has filed a brief on behalf of a former Kentucky county clerk that it says could lead to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Kim Davis, then the Rowan County clerk, made national headlines in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to several same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs.

Liberty Counsel, based in Orlando, Florida, and labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed the brief Monday with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, according to a news release from Liberty Counsel and first reported by Jezebel.

Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a Tuesday press release that “Kim Davis deserves justice in this case since she was entitled to a religious accommodation from issuing marriage licenses under her name and authority.”

“This case has the potential to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and extend the same religious freedom protections beyond Kentucky to the entire nation,” Staver said.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning in 2015 ordered Davis to jail for five days for contempt for refusing to comply with a court order. Bunning earlier this year ordered Davis to pay $260,104 in fees and expenses to attorneys who represented one of the couples she refused a marriage license. Bunning had earlier ordered Davis to pay the couple, David Ermold and David Moore, $100,000 in damages for violating their constitutional rights. Liberty Counsel is appealing Bunning’s decisions.

Davis lost her bid for reelection as Rowan County clerk in 2018.

Chris Hartman, the director of Kentucky’s Fairness Campaign, told the Lantern Tuesday that the latest legal move on Davis’ behalf is “sad and desperate” but also within the realm of possibility under the current U.S. Supreme Court.

“The threat of anti-LGBTQ hate groups … is real, however, and it comes as no surprise that they are seeking to overturn LGBTQ marriage in America. With an arch-conservative Supreme Court that’s already upended half a century of abortion rights, anything is unfortunately possible.”

Court documents filed by Liberty Counsel point specifically to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, saying the court should overturn Obergefell for the same reasons. In the abortion case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion that the court could use the same rationale to overturn earlier decisions on same-sex marriage and access to contraception.

“Obergefell was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today because it was based entirely on the legal fiction of substantive due process, which lacks any basis in the Constitution,” say court documents filed by Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel has not yet responded to a Lantern inquiry seeking further comment.

Ermold and Moore were married Oct. 31, 2015 in an outdoor ceremony on the Morehead State University campus, which the student newspaper, The Trail Blazer, covered.

Read Liberty Counsel’s brief

072324OpeningBriefofKimDavis

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