Gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft visits BG; talks drugs and education

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - With just over a month until the primary election, many candidates, including former ambassador and gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft, are in the final stages of their campaigns.

Craft visited Bowling Green’s Mr. B’s Pizza and Wings as part of her Kitchen Table Tour. Though Craft touched on many topics, her main focus was drugs and education in the Commonwealth and Senate Bill 150. The bill works to halt gender-affirming care for transgender youth and requires schools to craft a bathroom policy regarding transgender students.

Craft began the event by discussing how, as governor, she would want to enforce harsher penalties for drug dealers involved in fentanyl overdoses, including a court of press and the death penalty.

“We have a crisis in our state that is affecting our workforce, it is affecting the education of our children,” Craft said. “Some of these kids go home and the parents are not there because they’re trafficking themselves or worse, trafficking their children. It’s affecting the fabric of our state.”

Though her biggest topic of the night was the changes she’d make as governor to education in the commonwealth, Craft vowed that her first act as governor would be dismantling and rebuilding the Kentucky Board of Education.

“I’m worried about teachers, my mom was a teacher. I’m worried about students, I have 12 grandkids, and I’m worried about parents,” Craft said. “Every child is going to receive a quality education, not an education on critical race theory, but an education that will help them to fulfill their potential.”

Craft also had with her State Senator Max Wise, sponsor of Senate Bill 150, and Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer, who has been outspoken about her discontent with transgender involvement in women’s sports.

Craft voiced her support for Wise, Gaines, and the bill saying Kentucky education has become a victim of “woke ideologies.”

“We need to take a deep dive, see where we can carve and where these woke ideologies are starting,” Craft said. “We’ve got to protect our young adults, we have to make certain that there’s a level playing field for girls, that it’s safe. I don’t mind there being a separate category for transgender sports, that’s perfectly fine.”

Popular contention with the bill was the negative effects it could have on the mental health of trans youth, though Craft and Gaines both argued that it was unfair to prioritize one group’s mental health over another.

“Because what about my mental health, my feelings, my self perception, my privacy, my safety, my dignity, my fair opportunities?” Gaines said. “There’s so much that goes into it and I think we often forget to consider the other side.”

Craft is one of several candidates up for Governor this season, with election day being May 16.

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