Paducah pastor doesn't buy what McConnell is selling

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

The Rev. Jim Gearhart of Paducah wrote Sen. Mitch McConnell expressing his opposition to the GOP’s Robin-Hood-in-Reverse tax bill.

McConnell, who likes to portray himself as a “family values” guy, replied with a letter defending his vote for the legislation, which the senate majority leader claimed “will bring lasting relief to middle-class families, small businesses, and Kentucky workers.”

Gearhart, a retired Disciples of Christ pastor, didn’t buy what the senator was selling and wrote him back:

I respectfully disagree with your conclusions regarding the Tax Cut Act. The possible addition of $2000 to a family in a year is nothing! How about raising the percentage of money families get to something closer to what people like yourself, or corporate executives, make? The income disparity in our country has been objectively documented. I really don't understand your thinking about what is good for the people of Kentucky or the nation. Your political verbiage and resulting actions do not display to me anything more than a passion for supporting a political agenda that gives advantages to the rich and disadvantages to the poor. In Luke 9:48 (CEB) we read "Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me. Whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever is least among you is the greatest.'" This brief scripture says much about the direction our moral compass should be pointing, and, although I am not happy with either party right now, the party of Abe Lincoln would be unrecognizable to the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.

I would like to speak to you one on one, Kentuckian to Kentuckian. let me know when you have the time.

Sincerely,

Rev. Jim Gearhart

Class of 1968 P.R.P HS [Pleasure Ridge Park High School] Louisville

We Presbyterians—“the Frozen Chosen”--don’t do “amens” except at the end of hymns. But Gearhart’s missive merits an “amen!” from this multi-generation one.