Inquiring Minds

I have always enjoyed watching politicians in an open forum try to answer a really stupid question. This is the question the moderator should have put in the trash can but didn’t.

Last night at Stonewall Elementary candidates for Lexington’s 9th District seat (Jay McChord and Wanda Mattingly) and all six of the candidates (Kay, Shafer, Gorton, Gray, Ellinger and Brown) for the three at-large seats had to answer this question.

The question went something like this, I paraphrase,

“How would you, as a council member, deal with the illegal immigrant problem in Lexington and the associated strains it is placing on social services and schools?”

Now I’m sure the answer that flashed in the minds of a few of the candidates probably went something like this:

“If you had been listening when we explained what the council does you wouldn’t have asked such a stupid question.”

Or maybe:

“When the Congress of the United States transfers the responsibility for those issues from Border Patrol and Citizenship and Immigration Services to the Lexington Urban County Council I’ll get back to you.”

However, most of the candidates made a valiant attempt to give a reasonable answer to this litmus test question.

Generally the answer was something like this:

We are going to follow the law and face the reality that Lexington has a Latino population of at least 30,000 individuals and we will treat them as human beings and deal with them with compassion and fairness.

But the real question here wasn’t what are you going to do on this issue as a member of the Council.

The question was really this:

What are you going to do to keep the Latino’s in their place?

The even in non-partisan races the Republican politics of hate and divisiveness are alive and well in south Lexington.