Fussing over Cameron’s key fob obscures the dangerous, extreme things he is doing | Opinion
.JPG "Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the Republican nominee for Kentucky governor, announced Wednesday he’s chosen Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, as his running mate.")
Earlier this week at a meeting to plan our coverage of the November election, my colleague Austin Horn had an excellent observation.
“The silly season is here and it’s gonna get sillier.”
The past few weeks have made Austin a prophet.
The month started off with dueling campaign finance scandals from Daniel Cameron and Gov. Andy Beshear as the campaigns really heat up. Now, we have a frankly nonsensical story from the Huffington Post about Daniel Cameron’s relationship with his key fob. He doesn’t use it very often, the Huff Post story told us in breathless tones. It would have been useful if his office staff had pointed out a plethora of obvious points: Cameron travels with security, who probably open doors for him. Elected officials work in a variety of places, including home offices. This doesn’t tell us much about his work habits.
But this story obscures the very real work that Cameron is doing to make Kentucky a modern day Gilead when it comes to LGBTQ and women’s reproductive rights. It turns out he’s one of 18 state Attorneys General who has urged federal officials not to allow a new rule to shield medical records. In short, Cameron wants the power to get medical records of people who leave Kentucky to get an abortion or gender affirming care in a state where those things are legal so they could be used in a prosecution later on. So let’s say a family went up to Cincinnati Children’s to obtain puberty blockers for their trans child, or if a woman went to Illinois to abort a still born fetus, those records could be subpoenaed by Cameron.
Whatever happened to the GOP as the party of privacy and individual rights? If a Kentuckian smokes some pot in Colorado, will they get arrested back home too?
This is extreme, and I just don’t think most people are that extreme.
Reasonable people just don’t want their medical records laid open to prying eyes of anyone, particularly not the government. People may not understand trans people or know a lot of them, they do know gay people, and they do not want them to be persecuted.
But politicians keep ginning up these culture war battles to keep us divided, and in choosing Robby Mills, Cameron will have a passionate culture warrior. Some internet sleuths found an Owensboro Messenger article from 1999, when Mills was a Henderson city commissioner discussing a fairness ordinance. It quoted Mills as saying “you’ll never convince me ... that homosexuals need special rights.”
Judging from more recent work, it doesn’t seem as though Mills has changed his mind much. Mills also sponsored the first anti-trans sports bill in 2022 and is co-chair of the legislature’s Pro-Life Caucus. What could be more politically significant is that he support the “sewer bill” that upended the teacher pension system and ultimately doomed Gov. Bevin’s re-election.
Silly and sillier
Meanwhile the ad blizzards continue, unless you’ve already started muting them as soon as they come on. Our politics team is kept busy untangling truth and fiction, such as Cameron’s claim that he is responsible for the nearly $900 million in opioid settlement dollars.
Cameron claims sole credit even though Gov. Andy Beshear is the Attorney General who filed the lawsuits that brought that money to the state.
But the campaign may be addling the Beshear administration, too. On Thursday, reporter John Cheves published an investigation into a backlog of nursing home inspections at facilities with horrifying conditions.
Then there was this jaw-dropping statement: “In May, the Herald-Leader requested interviews for this story with Kentucky’s health secretary, Eric Friedlander, and one of Friedlander’s subordinates, Inspector General Adam Mather, a former nursing home executive whose office oversees nursing home inspections across the state. Inspector General Adam Mather Provided The health cabinet declined to make the officials available for interviews. The cabinet also declined to answer most written questions the newspaper submitted over the next two months about Kentucky’s nursing home inspection backlog and the reasons for it.”
This has continued to be a weak spot in an administration that talks about transparency but rarely volunteers it. Shutting down the experts who can help the public understand these issues is not a good PR strategy. Beshear is understandably nervous over how headlines like these, or a recent story about foster children staying in office buildings, appear during a campaign. But people are far more willing to hear about the complexities of these problems than to hear that no one in state government wants to talk about them.
Campaigns bring out the worst in everyone. Stay calm and turn off the TV because as Austin said, the silly is just starting.
