Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Linda Gorton is under fire for recently proposing to redirect $120,000 from funds earmarked for an emergency rental assistance program to instead provide Critical Race Theory (CRT) training to council members. The assistance program was aimed at helping people that suffered financial blows from the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Gorton is trying to take $120,000 specifically allocated for housing assistance from the assistance program’s $1.9m budget and use it for diversity training.
Even the Lexington Housing Justice Collective, a charity fighting to end homelessness and the “white supremacist foundations of housing in Lexington,” acknowledged via Twitter that the mayor’s proposal comes amid an already “deeply underfunded” rental assistance program.
Although the group conceded that it did not disagree with CRT training, it added on Twitter Saturday:
The proposal is part of Mayor Gorton’s response to the Commission for Racial & Equality. But Black and Brown people are disproportionately evicted. Taking $ from rental assistance does not advance racial justice. It means more Black and Brown people will lose their homes.
CRT, a worldview that has been mainstreamed by the radical left, promotes the demonization of the United States by teaching the claim that American laws and institutions are inherently a tool of white supremacy and privilege.
The Lexington Housing Justice Collective put the proposal on blast via a Twitter thread on Saturday, writing:
Monday, [Mayor Gorton] proposed funding implicit bias training for city employees. Sounds great, right?
BUT: the money to fund the [training] is being taken from emergency rental assistance—during the worst eviction crisis in at least a decade.
The city’s rental assistance program is already deeply underfunded. Now Mayor Gorton wants to cut funding even more. This will lead to even more Lexingtonians losing their homes in the coming months, after hundreds have already been evicted since August 24.
What we need is MORE rental assistance, a comprehensive and automatic eviction moratorium, and for [Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear] to #CancelRent. Instead, [Mayor Gorton] is trying to cut rental assistance. Shame.
The Lexington Housing Justice Collective described the proposal in detail in one of the tweets, noting that the $120,000 would be used for diversity training sessions at the cost of up to $2,000 per day for 35 council employees at a time.
The anti-homelessness group urged the public to come out against the mayor’s plans.
“Tell them to fund implicit bias using money from the oversized police budget, not the underfunded rental assistance program,” the group wrote.
The Lexington city council will reportedly vote on the proposal at 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Author Ryan James Girdusky also took to Twitter to lambast Mayor Gorton’s proposals.
“Lexington’s woke mayor is taking funs for poor people and using them to pay a rich white woman so she can teach city employees how to become woke … this is progressivism in the 21st century,” he tweeted.
Via an executive order issued in September, President Donald Trump’s administration cracked down on providing federal employees with diversity training “divisive concepts” such as America or individual Americans being “inherently racist or sexist … or oppressive.”
While Trump defended the move during the first presidential debate in late September, Democrat presidential candidate Biden appeared to support CRT, as some reports have suggested.
Like many places across the nation, the state of Kentucky is currently facing a coronavirus surge of infections, prompting Gov. Beshear to impose restrictions on businesses and gatherings that Mayor Gorton plans to implement.