Kentucky Fairness Alliance
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The Kentucky Fairness Alliance (KFA) is a Kentucky gay rights organization formed in 1993. The organization provides public education and advocacy on issues affecting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) individuals and families in Kentucky.
KFA serves the entire Commonwealth and also includes local chapters in Lexington, Richmond, Northern Kentucky, Owensboro, and Elizabethtown. It is affiliated with the separate Louisville-based Fairness Campaign, another gay rights organization whose founding predates KFA and whose focus is on the Louisville area.
[edit] History
Because of its leading role as an advocate for GLBT Kentuckians, the history of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance mirrors the legal and legislative issues affecting gay rights in Kentucky since the early 1990s. In 1993 a group of GLBT Kentuckians primarily from Louisville formed the Kentucky Fairness Alliance Education Fund with the expressed purpose of educating the public on GLBT issues. Many of the founding women and men in the group were active in Louisville's Fairness Campaign. The group's formation was in part a response to attempts in the Kentucky General Assembly to recriminalize consensual sodomy after the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned a statute making consensual oral or anal sex between members of the same sex illegal while allowing these sex acts between members of the opposite sex.
The group was active in the passage in 1999 of local ordinances to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations due to a person's sexual orientation in Louisville, Lexington-Fayette County, Jefferson County, and Henderson. These ordinances were dubbed in the Fairness ordinances by local city leaders and media. The Henderson ordinance was repealed the following year. The City of Covington passed a Fairness ordinance in 2003.
KFA unsuccessfully opposed the 2004 passage of an amendment to the Kentucky Constitution than bans same-sex marriage and civil unions for same-sex couples.
[edit] Other regular activities
State and local media regularly turn to KFA staff and volunteers for responses to news events involving GLBT people. The group also conducts trainings on a variety of topics including legal documentation for same-sex domestic partners, lobbying, and buying a home as a same-sex couple. Organizationally, KFA employees an Executive Director and several staff who, in turn, are overseen by a volunteer Board.
