Here in Kentucky, we have reached a new low in white Christian nationalist politics.
Barely a week after Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear decisively won re-election in our deep-red state, parents Brad and Stacy Briscoe marched their teenage daughter to the front of an Anderson County Schools Board meeting — and effectively outed her.
I have never seen a mob of this magnitude — so overwhelming that the meeting had to be moved, in real time, to a larger venue.
Hundreds packed that Nov. 13 board meeting, held less than 15 miles from the state Capitol. They came, they said in speech after speech, to support the Briscoes, who had filed a complaint stating that their daughter was groomed by a school counselor, and to demand the superintendent and counselor be fired.
“The counselor acted inappropriately by encouraging the student to seek a legal consultation regarding emancipation without her parents’ knowledge or consent,” according to the Lexington Herald Leader’s summary of the complaint. “In February, the student told her parents that she and her female classmate were in a romantic relationship and had been since the fall of 2022. The Briscoes expressed to (their daughter) their strong opposition to homosexuality, which was based upon convictions derived from their Christian faith.” (The Briscoes, reports the Herald Leader, “insist that the reason for the daughter’s punishment was her dishonesty with her parents, not her sexuality.”)
The complaint also alleges that Anderson County Schools superintendent Sheila Mitchell investigated the counselor but declined to punish her. Yet neither Mitchell nor the counselor can defend themselves, because the Briscoes have thus far refused to sign a release allowing them to publicly share details about the case.
I live in this community, population 24,000; I have attended many school board meetings; I have watched folks speak in anger and demand change; I myself have spoken at contentious meetings, one in which I…
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