By Marilou Johanek, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission
Busted. Ohio Republicans love to grandstand on parents’ rights and protection of children when they’re pushing culture war crazy like banning books, whitewashing history, or canceling nonexistent gender indoctrination in grade schools. They’re fighting for your parental rights to be in charge of your child and to protect that darling from all the fearful imaginings invented on Fox “News.”
All for show. A charade to justify mindless legislation on made-up crises. But the gig is up. State lawmakers masquerading as champions of parents and protectors of children just voted against parents deciding what’s best for their children and against protecting Ohio children from harm. Busted.
The supermajorities of gerrymandered Republicans in the Ohio Senate and Ohio House voted to replace parental authority with political control. The radical fundamentalists running state government with an iron fist know better than you parents when it comes to your child. Simple peasants with kiddos can’t be trusted to do the right thing. They need to be told by unaccountable authoritarians in the Statehouse.
“We tell parents what to do all the time. So this isn’t any different. Sometimes the General Assembly has to step in and tell them what to do,” said Republican state Sen. Stephen Huffman.
“The same government that requires you to send your children to school…has the obligation to prevent parents and physicians from chemically castrating and sterilizing their children,” said Republican state Rep. Gary Click, sponsor of the extreme anti-trans bill becoming law in less than 90 days.
“The governor has said we should let parents make these decisions. Well, that’s nice as a headline,” but “there are parents making bad decisions, as parents always do,” said Republican state Senate President Matt Huffman.
What the impossibly arrogant and outrageous Republican overlords in the Ohio legislature are saying is that parents aren’t up to the job of raising their children without right-wingers calling the shots. Clearly the extremists believe parents with transgender minors are inadequate to the task of providing health care for them not proscribed by politicians (without medical or psychological training).
When MAGA Republicans overrode Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of an anti-trans bill that bans gender-affirming care for minors and restricts transgender participation in sports, they mocked parents of this state under the pretext of protecting their kids. They trotted out the same fearmongering delusions and alternative realities parroted in scores of other Republican-dominated legislatures to beat up a strawman unable to hit back.
They legislated away the rights of Ohio’s transgender youth and their parents not for any credible, medically-valid, evidence-based rationale, but because exploiting transgenderism is politically expedient in MAGA world. State Republicans enacted a gender-affirming healthcare ban — despite overwhelming opposition from physicians, children’s hospitals, counselors, parents, patients, and every major medical association in the country — because polls backed indefensible cruelty. Republicans stopped Ohio parents, relying on the best medical advice and long-established clinical practices, from giving their trans children gender-affirming treatment that could well save their lives.
The governor relayed parental concerns when he vetoed the bill Republicans restored. “They told me their child is alive only because they received care,” he said. “Ultimately, I believe this is about protecting human life.” Ultimately, Republican lawmakers believed targeting the transgender community with discriminatory legislation was worth sacrificing human life to score ideological points.
They broadly dismissed trans youth as “kids doing something stupid” and portrayed their parents as pushovers who succumb to “the culture that has been created behind this movement.” (?) Ohio Senate President Huffman — presumably a scholar on gender dysphoria, its diagnosis and treatment — also argued baselessly that “parents are being pressured” to accept their transgender children who are being “encouraged by a lot of people” to be trans so “of course, they’re gonna latch onto it.”
With that tortured logic, Republican leadership gaveled a sweeping anti-trans bill into law and ignored DeWine’s warning that the consequences on “a very small number of children … would be profound.” Collateral damage. The price of maintaining a MAGA Republican grip on power through hate-baiting.
After putting vulnerable transgender youth in unnecessary danger by denying their parents the right to save them with health care, Republican state senators joined their counterparts in the House in refusing to protect Ohio’s kids and communities from tobacco addiction. It’s the leading cause of preventable death in Ohio, according to the state’s health director.
However, the GOP supermajorities sided with Big Tobacco over local efforts to reduce the high rates of tobacco use among young Ohioans. So flavored tobacco products, hugely popular with high schoolers and young adults, will soon be back on store shelves after Republicans overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that prevented Ohio cities from banning their sale.
Lawmakers voted not in the public interest or as proponents of kids, many of whom start vaping with widely available flavored products that target children with fruit or candy flavors. They legislated away the home rule rights of people trying to improve public health and prevent kids from becoming nicotine addicts at 14, 15, or 16 years old. Protecting the tobacco industry and businesses was more important.
Ohio MAGA Republicans can wail all they want about the protection of children or the rights of parents but truly the gig is up. The gerrymandered frauds have been exposed again. Busted.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Hmmm, Gary Click. When people talk about agendas, they are talking about this bigot. It figures he is an IFB pastor.
This fear-mongering transphobe was recently caught at a meeting of state representatives where he agreed that trans care should be banned for adults as well. Click is quoted as saying, when referring to the idea of banning trans care for adults, “what we know legislatively is we have to take, sometimes, small bites.”
Read more details here: https: //www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/01/gop-lawmakers-busted-saying-they-want-to-ban-gender-affirming-care-for-adults-too/
I have always said laws against minors are only the start, and they will keep going until they have made it illegal for anyone to be transgender or gender non conforming. Click has admitted this is the goal.
And sadly I don’t think people care enough to vote these people out. Too many just look away and do not care as it has no impact on them and they don’t agree with that “lifestyle”.
Sage–You are right about legislation aimed at minors (in the name of “parents’ rights). Some people think I, a transgender woman, am exaggerating when I say that if Trump is re-elected, I could end up dead, in prison or committed to some institution that I can’t get out of. But I see that the seeds of the vine that could strangle us have already been sown.
One thing I find ironic is that people who don’t want to let trans kids get the care they need are the same (or the same kinds of) people who tout homeschooling and corporal punishment. And their “reasoning” is the same: “parents’ rights.”
Yes, I experience the same when I talk about this problem. People think I am just being overly dramatic. Some have waved the problems off by saying lawsuits will stop this problem. But I have no faith in the courts. Even living in a very liberal state will not protect me from the plans already being discussed in the halls of congress should the republicans gain control.
And since few people are paying attention and since a lot of Americans either agree, or just look the other way, or just don’t understand the reality of the situation, there is little hope it can change before it gets much worse.
It is also typical that when Christians want parents to have rights to raise children as they see fit, they really mean as Christians see fit. They want parents rights and bodily autonomy only by their own standards.
As my Baptist sister told me this week, people like her non binary grandkid, or her long haired grandson who is “doing his own thing”, must learn to blend into societal norms and conform to expectations. I am sure she included me in that as well.
So its easy, MJ, all we have to do is meet their standards and assimilate and completely ignore the reality of who we are, and we will no longer have any problems and can be happy for ever and ever and ever.
I can’t say i understand transgender as i’ve never dealt with that, but i don’t believe we should stop folks from getting help and whatever care they need to be whole and happy.
It is clear to me that right-wing extremists are about control over the population by enacting all their rules and “values”. They’ll use phrases like “parental rights” when it suits their narrative, then declare that they know better when parents choose to exercise those rights in a way extremists don’t approve. Just as we warned that striking down Roe was not the end of it, that the goal is 100% abortion bans (and probably contraception bans too), the same is true here – not that their goal is to restrict treatment for trans minors but banning ALL gender-affirming care for ALL PEOPLE. Some of the most extreme will actually admit it.
Yes, many Christians are absolute that their way is the only way. Maybe they will come pull the chip out of my brain which records and treats seizures.
My Baptist preacher dad would take the slippery slope of “Well, any sensible person knows…” and then slip-slide his way to whatever statement reduced his anxiety at a challenging question regarding morals/ethics.
What is always most revealing is how willing people are to actually listen and not build a bandwagon with the words coming into them. When parents listen to kids and don’t need to react to their own issues from childhood (i.e. Whack that kid on this side of the head with Old Testament!), then it is actually possible for human love to prevail in scary and disconcerting situations. People with the ability to carefully listen for only a specific reason (The Great Commission) are not occupying full humanity because the person sharing with them is not attended to first and foremost; a fnatasy Cause is first and all that matters.
Master narcissists do this all the time: Take a very special interest in a person and make them feel they are really heard, really cared for so deeply. Then they proceed to use the intimacy as a weapon to monopolize and make the person become their supplier, their keeper. Evangelicalism walks this knife-edge all the time. Ruined people like Doctor Tee don’t care about this fellow Jesus at all really. They only care to instruct and control and at all costs avoid the excruciating abandonment in themselves.
Observing politics these present days makes me feel I’m in lab full of injured ‘specimens’ and yet, listening here, Gerencser, on this blog, I feel something like I do when I move among trees and the wind says, “I know you. We are one, came from same place and are going there.” A walk is deep, silent learning and it breeds profound respect for all if it is done with a quiet, open heart. Perhaps it is time to vote on human actions and not ‘platforms’. I think I would vote for the one who goes for solitary walks and listens. That’s quite silly, I know and so naive regarding the machinations of the military industrial complex that has maimed us all.
Brian. I wept when I read this:
“listening here, Gerencser, on this blog, I feel something like I do when I move among trees and the wind says, “I know you. We are one, came from same place and are going there.” A walk is deep, silent learning and it breeds profound respect for all if it is done with a quiet, open heart. “
Thank you!