News & Commentary

As 2020 came, many of us counted down with hopes that the new year would bring new experiences and new ways forward. Despite the calendar telling us it was 2020, Frankfort’s calendar still said 1990.

With a five to three vote of the fiscal court, Woodford County, population 26,368, became the first Kentucky County in two decades to approve a Fairness Ordinance prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Jefferson County was the last county-wide municipal government to approve the measure in October 1999 before merging with the city of Louisville. Lexington-Fayette County's merged government also approved a Fairness Ordinance in July 1999. 

View ACLU-KY white pages on three pieces of legislation moving through the Kentucky Senate and House of Representatives:

Our team is at the Capitol working with legislators to propose new bills, make bills better, and defeat harmful legislation. Check out the guide below to learn more about the process and how you can get involved.

With a unanimous vote of 5-0 by the city council, the Campbell County town of Fort Thomas, population 16,263, became the seventeenth city in the Commonwealth and fifth in Northern Kentucky to approve a Fairness Ordinance prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. 

Kentucky must implement policies addressing racial bias in medicine and increase access to doulas, who support pregnant patients. Learn more and tell your legislators to VOTE YES on the Maternal CARE Act here.

LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES

Newly elected governor Andy Beshear signed an executive order Thursday, December 12, automatically restoring voting rights to more than 175,000 Kentuckians with past felony convictions who have completed their full sentences, probation, and parole. It also applies to people who are still on probation or parole only because of unpaid fines or restitution.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced today it would not review a decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Kentucky’s forced narrated ultrasound law against a First Amendment challenge. Today’s ruling allows H.B. 2, Kentucky’s forced, narrated ultrasound law, to take effect. The physicians at Kentucky’s last abortion clinic will be forced to subject every patient to their ultrasound images, a detailed description of those images, and the sounds of the fetal heart tones prior to an abortion — even if the patient objects or is covering their eyes and blocking their ears, and even if the physician believes that doing so will cause harm to the patient. “By refusing to review the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, the Supreme Court has rubber-stamped extreme political interference in the doctor-patient relationship,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “This law is not only unconstitutional, but as leading medical experts and ethicists explained, deeply unethical. We are extremely disappointed that the Supreme Court will allow this blatant violation of the First Amendment and fundamental medical ethics to stand.”H.B. 2 has been widely and unequivocally condemned by the medical community, including in friend-of-the-court briefs submitted by the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Public Health Association, as well as by more than 130 leading biomedical ethicists from around the country.