Profile in Cowardice
They did it. The MAGA super-majority of the Ohio Legislature over-rode Governor DeWine’s veto of their cowardly bill to ban transgendered care for minors in Ohio and ban transgendered women from Ohio K-12 and collegiate sports. So the Legislature has managed to pass a law that impacts our society – or at least the miniscule few that are transgendered minors (about 3300 in a decade) and the transgendered girls who play high school sports (7 to 10).
I’m sure that it takes a law, and a veto, and an over-ride; in our state with 2.5 million children (under 17): “By God, we’ll protect those millions from the few”.
It’s embarrassing. And it’s disgusting – like watching a bully on the playground. Even worse, like watching a bully on the playground and not being able to do anything about it. All of these “Bully” politicians, making their MAGA political points, at the expense of the defenseless, the most vulnerable among us. The blood of the innocents will be on their MAGA hands, and match their red MAGA hats. We already know that the attempted suicide rate among transgendered youth is high. But MAGA politicians don’t listen, and they don’t care. They KNOW – beyond a reasonable certainty, what THEIR God created. And so the rest of the state must now kowtow to their religious certainty, because in Ohio where “…With God, all things are possible,” is plastered in almost every school in the state, humanity is more than uncertain. It is missing in action.
A Civil Right
This fight isn’t over. Now it will move to the Federal Courts, a venue that will look at the civil rights violations inherent in this legislation. If everyone has equal protection under the law, then the right of a transgendered child to seek medical care should not be denied. If parents have that “RIGHT TO CHOOSE” so often trumpeted by the same MAGA Republicans in front of school boards, then surely parents have the right to choose the medical care for their child. And what could be a more fundamental right then to have the right to choose sexuality. The MAGA God of “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” surely cannot be rammed down the rest of Ohio’s throats. The First Amendment establishment of religion clause must still reign supreme, even in the Buckeye state.
I hope the Courts agree. And I thank the Governor, Mike DeWine, for trying to stand up for the few. I won’t even say he’s not trying to get re-elected: he did the right thing, I think for the right reasons, and that’s enough. I wish other politicians in Ohio would learn from him. Sometimes it’s more important to have the courage of conviction, rather than the cowardice of expediency.
Out-Flanked
But that is the essence of the “new” MAGA-Republican Party. To stay in power, politicians must not get out-flanked to the Right. And nothing, ever, is more important than maintaining power. We see the same thing nationally. This week, a solution to the Southern Border crisis is fading. Not because it’s unattainable, but because it’s not politically convenient for their one candidate for President. So that solution goes “under the bus”, possibly along with support for Ukraine against Russian aggression. Not because it’s right, and not even because it’s controversial. In the end, the vast majority of legislators and Americans would agree. But because it might be a “feather” in Joe Biden’s cap: then it’s Damn them all.
And, frankly, the Democrats in the US Senate, and the Democrat in the White House, seem helpless. At least here in Ohio, the few Democrats left un-gerrymandered in the legislature can cry out against the super-majority. But what good is a Democratic majority, when a rump-MAGA caucus of crazies, the whole eight or so of them in the House of Representatives, can call the shots. The MAGA minority are willing to burn every bridge, throw every victim to the wolves, to get what they want, nationally, and here in Ohio.
Charity for All
John C Calhoun, the pro-slavery Senator from South Carolina in the first half of the 19th century, wrote eloquently about the “Tyranny of the Majority”. He represented the “minority” slave-holding view, one that kept the United States entangled until the Civil War. He managed to create, through his eloquence and manipulation, a “tyranny of the minority”. For over a decade, slavery was a “forbidden subject” on the floor of the House of Representatives.
And so we are living in a “tyranny of minority” now, both in the national government, and in Ohio as well. There’s little to do about it, except to rise up in November, and take action at the voting box. The majority will can prevail, but only if the majority actual exercises its freedom – to vote.
Then we can “throw the bums out”, and get on with, as Lincoln said:
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
It’s scary – the words of Lincoln, at the end of America’s Civil War, seem so appropriate today.
