What's wrong with this picture?
Kentucky is impoverished, the state budget is stretched too thin, unemployment is high, hundreds of thousands of our residents don't have health insurance, drug abuse is rampant and the prisons are bursting at the seams while the schools are struggling to educate our children.
So, with a legislative session looming, several concerned lawmakers pre-file a bill to provide a constitutional protection for the right to hunt and fish, a right they all readily admit is not under threat.
Come again? Rep. John "Bam" Carney, R-Campbellsville, one of the bill's sponsors, explained it this way: "We thought it was important that we make a statement here for states' rights. I don't see any imminent threat to our hunting rights at the moment. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say." To paraphrase: There's no problem but we want to waste our time on this.
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The scary thing about this is that Kentucky has real problems. An ounce of prevention would be better applied to things like improving schools and providing drug rehabilitation.
Politics can be an amusing sport, but when it gets this far out of whack it verges on dangerous. Kentucky politicians, always too willing to be patsies for some national ideologues, seem to have bought into this manipulation based on a faux-states-rights philosophy.
Let's hope this meaningless proposal is quickly brushed aside by hard-working legislators who realize a legislative session is better spent trying to address real, current problems in the state.
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