Anti-gay Kentucky governor-elect Matt Bevin is VERY ANGRY about the above cartoon published yesterday by the Lexington Herald-Leader. Bevin, who has four adopted children from Africa, has issued a press release which threatens the paper with reprisals once he assumes office. The Louisville Courier-Journal reports:
“The Lexington Herald-Leader chose to articulate with great clarity the deplorably racist ideology of ‘cartoonist’ Joel Pett. Shame on Mr. Pett for his deplorable attack on my children and shame on the editorial controls that approved this overt racism,” Bevin said in the statement. “The tone of racial intolerance being struck by the Herald-Leader has no place in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and will not be tolerated by our administration,” he wrote. [Spokesperson] Jessica Ditto said she couldn’t elaborate on what Bevin meant when he said that “the administration wouldn’t tolerate such acts.”
In a piece that appeared on the newspaper’s website Thursday evening, Pett said he wasn’t attacking Bevin’s children, nor was he expressing racist views. “Did I push the envelope by chiding Gov.-elect Matt Bevin for jumping on the anti-Syrian refugee bandwagon? Sure, and I did so deliberately. I think he and the rest of the crowd who are demagoguing what happened in Paris for political gain deserve it,” Pett wrote. “Did I attack his children? Of course not. Was the cartoon racist or critical of adopting children, as some are suggesting? The fact that he adopted children from Africa, a continent whose promise and challenges I routinely draw about, is the thing I admire the most about Bevin,” he continued.
Pett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, says that Bevin himself brought his children into the picture by making them a centerpiece of his campaign.