Tagged: fairness

Vicco, Ky., brought national attention to the state this week by becoming the smallest town in the United States to pass a fairness law. Like many of you (we're guessing), we'd never even heard of Vicco until the news broke. So we invited Fairness Campaign director Chris Hartman to join us this week and tell us more. 

"It's about three and a half hours east," Chris explains, "and several hundred feet up."

Hartman and others from the Fairness Coalition worked directly with Vicco leaders on the law. He said folks in Vicco are what we might call "non-traditional allies" who may not fit our idea of what LGBTQ-rights supporters are.

"But that may just be because we all have some inappropriate stereotypes about what rural Americans are like, about what Appalachian folks are like, and about what people who live in coal country are like," Hartman said.

Joined by a coalition of Kentucky gay rights leaders, residents in Elizabethtown and Richmond are pressuring lawmakers to enact fairness laws in their cities.

The effort is part of a larger grassroots movement across the state to get such legislation passed in other cities such as Shelbyville, Bowling Green and Berea. Both ordinances would prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

In Kentucky, only the cities of Covington, Lexington and Louisville have a fairness legislation.

Louisville Fairness Campaign Chris Hartman says many residents in rural areas of the state don’t know that discrimination against LGBT citizens is still permitted.

"I think that there’s an assumption that these protections already exist or they don’t even know that they are necessary. We found in the survey that indicated 83 percent of Kentuckians support Fairness, that the majority also have no idea that this type of discrimination is still legal in most of Kentucky," he says.

In 2010, Chely Wright became the first country music star to come out as gay. Wright’s three-year journey to her coming out day is the subject of a new documentary by filmmakers Bobbie Berleffi and Beverly Kopf.

Louisville Metro Council Candidate Ray Barker has received a $1,000 contribution from anti-gay activist Dr. Frank Simon despite distancing himself from the controversial religious leader months earlier.