‘They are perfectly made.’ A Kentucky Republican’s personal journey to protect LGBTQ kids.
When Jamison Kerr came out as gay to his mother, he remembers, “she just opened her arms and gave me a hug while I cried.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Jamison, then a 19-year-old college student, or his mother, Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr, a Fayette County Republican raised in the Southern Baptist church.
“It was definitely eye-opening, sometimes it does take personal emotion to really open your heart about a certain thing,” Jamison Kerr said. “But she could not have been any more supportive.”
Fast forward 12 years to one night when Forgy Kerr stumbled across a movie called “Boy, Erased,” the true story of a gay teenager subjected to conversion therapy, a kind of pseudo science in which adults try to convince gay children they are straight based on the erroneous assumption that homosexuality is a mental illness, using shame and sometimes physical stimuli to associate pain and discomfort with the idea of being gay.
The Williams Institute of the UCLA Law School estimates that nearly 700,000 people nationwide have received conversion therapy; those who have received it are eight times more likely to have attempted suicide. The practice has been largely discredited by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association.
“I was sickened and I immediately texted (Louisville Republican Senator) Julie Raque Adams and said ‘have you watched this movie, please watch it,” Forgy Kerr said. “She texted me back and said ‘I see where you’re going with this.’ “
“This” turned into Senate Bill 85, the first Republican attempt to ban conversion therapy in the state. Sen. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, had introduced it several times before without any action. The bill would prohibit the practice and ban any public monies being used to pay for it. Rep. Lisa Willner has filed a House version of the bill, which has both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors.
The bill is now called the Mental Health Protection Act, which Forgy Kerr says is a better description given her research into Kentucky’s adolescent suicide rate, which jumped 9 percent between 2011 and 2015, according to the Kentucky Public Health Child Fatality Review Annual Report released in 2017. Suicide attempts are about three times higher among LGBTQ youth nationwide. Unfortunately, not all the lawmakers in Forgy Kerr’s party agree that we should be protecting these kids; I wrote last week about Rep. Savannah Maddox’s bill to prohibit therapy for transgender teens.
“We have to educate people,” Forgy Kerr said. “These children do not need to be repaired, they are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ in God’s image ... they are perfectly made.”
To that end, Forgy Kerr and her staff have been dropping off binders full of articles about conversion torture, as she calls it, to her colleagues, people like Sen. John Schickel, chair of the Licensing and Occupations Committee, where the bill has been assigned, and Senate President Robert Stivers who said earlier in the session that he’d never heard of the practice. Conversion therapy bans are already in place in at least 19 states.
She put Stivers’ binder in his Senate chair.
“I’ve been getting binders to everybody,” she said. “Really and truly, I do see this as education, really hopeful we’ll get a hearing.”
On Thursday at 1 p.m. at the Capitol, advocates and legislators will hold a press conference on the bills.
In the year 2020, it would be shocking if Republican legislators refused to even hear the bill in committee, especially when one of their own is showing them such a graceful way of approaching it. In Forgy Kerr, the state GOP has a rare gift, an empathetic politician with staunch pro-life credentials who can actually bring the two parties together on issues that transcend petty partisan politics. Last year, she championed a bill to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, which brought together numerous advocates who usually disagree.
“Being pro-life means I want to protect our youth from any kind of therapy that puts their lives in danger,” she said. “I’m very pro our children being safe and healthy and happy.”
Jamison Kerr never went to conversion therapy, but he has friends who still have PTSD from being told they were abnormal or sick because they were LGBTQ. He thinks his mother’s empathy, and her ability to listen to people and their concerns might be what will bring the bill into law this time around.
“I’m proud of my mom and I know her heart is in the right place,” he said. “This is a step in the right direction, for Republicans to be on the right side of history.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2020 at 10:12 AM.
