FRANKFORT'S CALLOUS CUTS WILL DENY FAMILIES CRUCIAL HELP

MANY of the conservative lawmakers who refuse to raise new state revenue
get themselves elected as defenders of the family, advocates of traditional
values, believers in the Christian faith.

There is a contradiction here, painfully apparent in the major cutbacks a
miserly Frankfort has forced on Seven Counties Services.

The agency, its finances ravaged by inflation and personnel costs, expects
to get $1.2 million less in state support this year. Having already been
forced to slash its budget by more than $3 million, Seven Counties still
must deal with a prospective $3 million shortfall.

The governing board has had to do the unthinkable. It has scaled back the
crucial help it provides to 22,000 of your most vulnerable neighbors in
Jefferson and nearby Kentucky counties. That means, for example, fewer beds
for the teenagers who are trying to break the sometimes deadly grip of
alcohol and drugs. It means less access to help for those suffering severe
emotional and developmental problems.

The agency, having created a good model for serving rural areas, now must
abandon its own success in Spencer County, increasing the difficulties of
those least able to maintain a regular schedule of trips for treatment at
other offices. At the Lighthouse center, cutbacks will mean fewer
in-patients accommodated.

These and other actions will weaken the very families who most need support.

The cutbacks mean a lesser commitment to desperate parents and their
drug-dependent or mentally challenged teenagers -- the ones who have sought
help, who have willingly taken the first steps toward solving their
problems or developing their potential.

Even affluent families strain under the pressures of such challenges,
despite the help of expensive private experts and programs. How much more
fragile are the poor families, consumed as they often are with working out
a spare existence?

How does a conservative legislature foster faith, hope and charity, when it
denies relief to uninsured poor families in which some loved one is
schizophrenic, bipolar, hyperactive, addicted?

What values does it honor when Frankfort leaves these families to cope, in
isolation, with their inevitable agony and despair?

What is the point in running for office on such values, but, when asked to
give them tangible support, running in the opposite direction? What profit
is there in gaining office, but losing sight of why you're there? What is
Christian, or profamily, about abandoning some of the "least of these," our
bretheren?