Jessica McIntosh - Freedom Voter Guide

Party:

Democrat

District:

34

Office:

State Senate

mcintoshky34.com

www.facebook.com/mcintoshky34

Survey Responses:

S = Support
O = Oppose
NR = No Response

Life	S	O	NR
1. Protecting Life: Protecting the right to life of an unborn baby with a beating heart.			X
2. Taxpayer Funded Abortion: Allowing taxpayer dollars to fund organizations that provide abortion.			X
3. Physician-Assisted Suicide: Allowing voluntary physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.			X

Candidate's Comments:

As an individual, I have a fundamental right to be free from restrictions imposed upon my healthcare decisions by the political or religious beliefs of others. For that reason, I reject the partisan and leading language used in these questions and firmly support access to lawful healthcare options for all people, regardless of biology, reproductive function, socioeconomic circumstances, or their decision to accept or decline the medical services available to them. I likewise oppose laws that would allow lawmakers or healthcare workers to substitute their own deeply held personal beliefs for the informed decisions of patients and their qualified healthcare providers. Matters involving pregnancy, reproductive healthcare, terminal illness, and end-of-life care are deeply personal. Government has a responsibility to protect individual rights, informed consent, and access to appropriate care - not to impose one political or religious belief system upon everyone.

First Amendment	S	O	NR
4. Conscience Rights for Professionals: Prohibiting the government from denying required licensure or certification to individuals because of their religious or political beliefs.	X
5. Conscience Rights for Faith-Based Organizations: Exempting faith-based organizations (e.g. adoption/foster care providers, private schools) from regulations that cause them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.		X
6. Prohibiting De-Banking/Insuring Based on Beliefs: Prohibiting financial institutions from shutting a customer’s bank account or canceling their insurance because of their religious or political views.	X

Candidate's Comments:

5. Regulations are accountability measures, and religious and political freedom should be protected within our regulatory framework. However, sincerely held beliefs should not become a shield from reasonable standards of consistency, transparency, accountability, or nondiscrimination when an organization chooses to provide services that are otherwise regulated. Religious liberty is a fundamental right, but it should not create a blanket exemption from protections designed to prevent discrimination, abuse, or harm to the people being served.

Family	S	O	NR
7. Protecting Kids from Social Media: Requiring platforms to by default prevent underage accounts without parental permission, preserve parents' authority when access is allowed, and remove addictive design features and data exploitation from underage accounts.	X
8(a). Parental Rights: Allowing parents to obtain professional counseling for a child struggling with gender confusion to help the child find comfort with his or her biological sex.			X
8(b). Parental Rights: Protecting parents from losing custody of their child solely because they treat their child consistent with his or her biological sex.			X

Candidate's Comments:

7. Design features and parental controls for underage accounts should be parent-friendly, transparent, and easy to manage. 8(a). I support a parent’s right to obtain qualified professional counseling for a child who is struggling with gender identity. I do not, however, support counseling or treatment with a predetermined outcome that the child must either accept or reject a particular identity. Likewise, I do not support gender-affirming treatment that is rejected by the intended patient. Counseling should provide a safe, independent opportunity for a young person to understand what they are experiencing without coercion in either direction. Even minors should have a meaningful voice in decisions about their own healthcare. Our job as parents is to guide our children toward the strength of heart and mind to choose the course of life that most honestly reflects who they are - not simply who we expected them to become. Forcing a child to reject their own understanding of themselves can cause serious psychological harm. 8(b). I do not believe a parent should lose custody of a child solely because of the parent’s personal beliefs about biological sex or gender identity. But the word “solely” matters. Custody decisions should continue to consider the individual child’s safety, well-being, and best interests, including whether there is abuse, neglect, coercive control, or serious psychological harm. Parental rights are important, but children have rights and individual needs as well. When an older minor is sufficiently mature and a family conflict becomes so severe that remaining under parental control is genuinely harmful, I support creating a meaningful legal pathway for independent advocacy and, in appropriate circumstances, emancipation. Protecting parental rights should never require us to pretend that every parent is always acting in the best interests of every child.

Education	S	O	NR
9. School Choice: Allowing the use of tax credits, vouchers, and/or education savings accounts to cover the cost of children attending the school of their parents’ choice, including private religious schools.		X
10. Free Speech at School: Protecting teachers and students from being forced to refer to a person by inaccurate pronouns that do not align with the person’s sex.		X
11. School Healthcare Disclosure to Parents: Requiring schools to inform parents of any mental, physical, or emotional health information and treatment that a child is receiving at school.	X
12. Transparency in School Curriculum & Activities: Giving parents access to the curriculum, presentations, and activities that their children are learning in school and allowing them to opt their children out of school extra-curricular activities, presentations, or specific lessons to which the parents object.	X

Candidate's Comments:

9. FIRM NO. 10. I do not believe teachers or students need special legal protection from being expected to extend basic respect and decency to others for the sake of their health, safety, well-being, and sense of belonging. I do not seek to protect people from every consequence of choosing to be deliberately disrespectful to someone else. We routinely address people by the names and nicknames they ask us to use without turning it into a political controversy. Pronouns should not require an entirely different standard simply because someone figured out how to politicize them. 11 & 12. While I support strong communication between parents and schools, I do not currently support imposing additional mandates on schools based on the assumption that parents are routinely being excluded from their children’s education or care. Students already have certain confidentiality protections, while parents have substantial rights to information about their children and, where applicable, to consent to or opt out of school-based services and activities. I am both a public-school employee and a parent whose children attend public schools. My experience is that schools are generally receptive when parents raise legitimate concerns about subject matter and work to keep families informed about health, safety, academics, and services – particularly when an issue may be controversial. I encourage parents to ask questions before attacking their schools. I would hope our legislators would do the same.

Health and Welfare	S	O	NR
13. Medical Rights of Conscience: Protecting health care workers from losing their jobs if they decline to participate in a procedure or treatment that violates their personal beliefs and conscience.		X
14. Women’s Privacy: Preventing males who identify as female from entering sex-separated spaces intended for females, such as showers, locker rooms, bathrooms, dormitories, women’s shelters, prisons, etc.		X
15. Protecting Pregnancy Centers: Ensuring pregnancy centers that provide life-affirming support to women and their families are not targeted or penalized by government officials.			X

Candidate's Comments:

13. This is the rare instance in which I would not support an absolute worker’s right to refuse assigned duties based solely on personal beliefs. Access to unbiased, nondiscriminatory healthcare is too fundamental - and healthcare itself too critical - for a patient’s options or treatment to depend on the personal beliefs of an individual provider. That said, healthcare workers should have the right to request reasonable accommodation for sincerely held beliefs, and employers should consider those requests based on the employee’s duties, the services provided, and the needs of the people they serve. Where an accommodation can reasonably be made without delaying, denying, or compromising a patient’s access to appropriate care, I believe it should be considered. But protecting an employee’s conscience should not come at the expense of a patient’s health, dignity, or equal access to healthcare. 14. The fact that this debate focuses almost exclusively on transgender women entering female-designated spaces, while giving comparatively little attention to transgender men entering male-designated spaces, illustrates the gender bias embedded in the discussion itself. We continue to treat women as uniquely vulnerable while too often failing to address the actual source of that vulnerability - violence against women. Requiring transgender people to use intimate spaces based solely on their sex assigned at birth can place them at greater risk of harassment, violence, and harm. Safety matters in every vulnerable setting - but policies should focus on actual conduct and actual threats, not presume that an entire group of people is inherently dangerous. Until we are willing to break this discussion down to the underlying concern - VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN - and seriously address the people who commit violence rather than repeatedly shifting public fear toward small, politically convenient groups, we will make no meaningful progress toward ending VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. 15. The civil-liberties principle I support is that government should not target or penalize any legitimate pregnancy-support or healthcare organization based on ideology, whether it is a pro-life pregnancy center or a comprehensive reproductive-health provider. At the same time, all organizations serving pregnant women should be subject to reasonable, neutral standards for truthful advertising, informed decision-making, health and safety, and professional services. Kentucky’s current approach is imbalanced because the state has restricted certain providers that offer expectant mothers' information about all legally available options. Women should be trusted with accurate information and allowed to make informed decisions for themselves and their families without government favoring one ideology or type of provider over another.

Endorsements:

Note: The endorsements listed are self-reported by the candidates and have not been independently verified.

AFL-CIO
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