News

Every Sunday, a men’s gospel choir visits University of Louisville Hospital to sing for the patients and the staff. The tradition has been going strong since 1931. WFPL’s Erin Keane dropped in last Sunday to listen.

Each week, members of the WFPL news team spotlight interesting stories we've read and enjoyed, for your weekend reading pleasure:

Gabe Bullard: At some point on Christmas Eve, someone, whether by appointment or accident, will flip to A Christmas Story on television. The 24-hour marathon of this movie on cable makes it a leg-shaped lava lamp of the holidays. You can't look away.

For more than 20 years, Louisville artist Ed White has led River City Drum Corps to teach children and young adults about the arts.

The program centers on African drumming and also helps at-risk with leadership skills. Participants are also challenged to find materials in their own neighborhoods to make their “pipe drums” for their first performance.

White was recently recognized for his work by the California-based United States Artists, and awarded a hefty $50,000 grant.

But while hundreds of young people have come through his doors to learn music and life lessons, White still faces budget cuts in his native-Louisville.

The Beltway newspaper Roll Call profiled Kentucky Fourth District Congressman Thomas Massie, which shows the Tea Party backed lawmaker has a scientific background that could help in Washington.

Massie defeated Democrat Bill Adkins in the fall election for the seat vacated by retiring Geoff Davis earlier this year, and was sworn in last month.

Observers are already calling Massie the "next Rand Paul," but the former Lewis County Judge Executive has his own biography that includes much more than Tea Party politics. Besides taking courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Massie is known as a big of scientist for having 24 technology-related patents.

From Roll Call:

In person, Massie looks younger than his 41 years. He’s an unusual mix of earnestly wonkish scientist and charismatic schmoozer. He laughs easily and tells stories with verve, charm and a slight northern Kentucky twang.

Even discussing fiscal cliff policy, his voice stays even, although his passion about reducing the nation’s debt is clear.

“I think the cuts need to happen,” he said, noting that he supports the GOP position to redistribute the cuts embedded in sequestration. “But if we can’t, they still need to happen.”

It's a story we heard several times during WFPL's Defining Fairness series: a young person leaves his or her rural town for college in a bigger city, meets other LGBTQ folks, and comes out! But for some folks, when the holidays roll around and they head home for Christmas... they have to go back into the closet. 

This week we spoke with Dr. Stephanie Budge from UofL, who recently taught a workshop on coping with the holidays as an LGBTQ person. She says while some families do overtly antagonistic things (like using the wrong pronoun for trans folks, or refusing to let their LGBTQ family member bring a partner to holiday functions), what she hears about the most is simply ignoring. A young person might come out as queer to their family only for the response to be silence, and an unwillingness to acknowledge their identity.

Dr. Budge gave us some coping strategies we can all use during moments of holiday stress and family conflict, how to take full advantage of your chosen family's love when your family of origin doesn't support you, and how to tell when things are so bad or unsafe it might be better to skip going home altogether. 

Here is the rundown for this edition of Byline:

At the top - School safety funding in Kentucky used to hover around $10 million a year through most of the 2000s.  But in 2009 and since, that funding fell by roughly 60%.  Tom Loftus from the Courier-Journal joins us to discuss the reasons and what might change.

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday says he disagrees with the National Rifle Association’s aggressive response to the Newtown, Connecticut shootings.

NRA officials made their first formal comments Friday following last week’s school shooting that left 26 dead.

During the no-questions press conference, officials listed movies and video games they believe contribute to school violence. Officials called on a task force to create a model program that would include training and arming guards who could protect school children.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has approved performance-based pay raises for thousands of state workers.

There will be three tiers of raises: Three percent for those whose job performance meets expectations, five percent for those exceeding expectations and eight percent for workers who are evaluated as ‘outstanding.’

Daniels predicts about ten percent of state employees will get no raise for failing to meet expectations or being in need of improvement.

Gov. Steve Beshear says he'll make a decision about Medicaid expansion in Kentucky by early next year.

While many states are still deciding on the early elements of the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare -- Kentucky has only one decision left: whether to opt in to Medicaid expansion.

Under the health care law, the federal government will pay 100 percent of costs for three years if states expand their Medicaid rolls to 138 percent of the poverty line.

A Louisville man is claiming that the Maker's Mark Bourbon House and Lounge at Fourth Street Live refused to allow him to host a party at the venue because all of the party-goers would be African-American, says a lawsuit filed this week in Jefferson Circuit Court.

Andre Mulligan alleges that the Maker's Mark Lounge "officials" asked him about the "'ratio' of 'black people' to 'white people' at the planned party during a meeting, the lawsuit said.