Subject: Victory in Kentucky!
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 16:27:15 -0500

For more information, contact Maria Price at 502/897-1973; Camille Soleil at
502/893-0788; or David Williams at 502/636-0935.

Thanks to the hard work of many individuals statewide, all thirteen anti-gay
measures introduced during the sixty-day biennial session of Kentucky's
General Assembly have been defeated:  most were assigned to committees whose
chairpersons managed to bottle them up; some measures were simply withdrawn.
 All of them died in committee through one means or another.

Particular mention must be made to Maria Price, lobbyist for the Kentucky
Fairness Alliance, whose tireless devotion was crucial to this victory; Linda
West of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance in Lexington, who was instrumental in
getting the community to make phone calls at critical junctures during the
session; Camille Soleil and Carla Wallace of the Louisville Fairness
Campaign; and the hundreds of other volunteers who made it all happen.  They
were helped by several moderate and liberal Democratic leaders and committee
chairmen in the House and the Senate.  Most of these measures were introduced
by conservative Republicans.

Following is a brief summary of the defeated measures:

(1)  Three bills or floor amendments would have had the effect of
recriminalizing same-sex sexual activity among consenting adults.

(2)  Three bills and one floor amendment would have prohibited recognition of
same-sex marriages.

(3)  One bill would have prohibited a person with HIV from being licensed as
a cosmetologist.

(4)  Two bills would have required public school teachers to teach that
"homosexual sodomy" is the primary method of contracting HIV.

(5)  Three bills attempted to make Kentucky an initiative state, thereby
allowing Oregon-style referenda to be voted on during the general election.

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