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Our Love Affair with Confident Ignorance and Stupidity Has Reached Awful New Heights

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By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission

Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.

That was January 2020.

Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.

For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.

It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.

Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.

As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.

Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.

It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.

That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.

Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.

Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.

A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.

And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.

We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We crave spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.

We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.

It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.

Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.

Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.

Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.

Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.

It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.

In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.

They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.

The clear intent of the bill is to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.

Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.

America’s love affair with swaggering ignorance and confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need to be paid. The damage will be extensive.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman and His Fellow Republicans Plan to Financially Harm Public Schools

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By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission

Does Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman hate public schools?

He very well might not hate public schools. I doubt that he would ever use those words. But as an observer, it just really comes off like Matt Huffman hates public schools.

Or maybe he has some sort of grudge against them and thinks they should struggle and suffer more than they already are.

Maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe he’s just callously indifferent to public schools. Or maybe it’s not hatred or indifference; it’s a kind of gristle-chewing contempt for public schools combined with a deep, warm, abiding love and affection for private, for-profit, and religious schools.

I really don’t know.

What I do know is that since Ohio’s system for funding public education was declared unconstitutional more than 25 years ago, Ohioans have only seen two brief periods of time when anything resembling a constitutional school funding formula has been in place: the evidence-based model passed and signed under Gov. Ted Strickland in 2009 and then quickly overturned by Gov. John Kasich in 2011, and the bipartisan Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan that was put in place in 2021.

Now the future of Cupp-Patterson is in jeopardy as Huffman has declared it “unsustainable.”

Huffman, who starts the year as Ohio House Speaker after being term-limited out as Ohio Senate President, enjoys enormous influence in the Ohio Statehouse amid Republican supermajorities in both chambers.

The Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan included a phasing-in schedule over six years, or three budget cycles in Ohio. Now that the first two phases have been implemented, Huffman is signaling he’s ready to call the thing off.

“I don’t think there is a third phase to Cupp-Patterson,” Huffman told reporters Monday. “I guess the clear statement I can say is I think those increases in spending are unsustainable.”

Unsustainable. Fair School Funding in Ohio is “unsustainable.”

Meanwhile, this past school year, Ohio lawmakers funneled nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars toward private schools after passing near-universal vouchers the year before. The vast majority of new private school voucher money from Ohio taxpayers went to families with their kids already in private schools.

In Ohio, 90% of students attend public schools, while only 10% attend private schools. But according to Huffman, shoveling nearly $1 billion per year to private schools to help families who were already using private schools is definitely, absolutely, no doubt sustainable, while funding Ohio’s Fair School Funding plan for 90% of students is not.

Even under Cupp-Patterson, school districts across Ohio are facing enormous difficulties.

Here are some headlines about Ohio school districts around the state from 2024:

• ‘Can’t survive’: Greater Cincinnati school district will have to make $1M in cuts (WKRC)

• Perrysburg schools considering cuts after levy failed in November (WTOL)

• Princeton City Schools announce hiring freeze, other cuts after tax levy failure (WCPO)

• Local school district to move forward with approved cuts after levy failure (WKRC)

• Ashtabula Area City Schools superintendent updates board on $1.7 million budget reduction plan (Star Beacon)

• Ravenna City Schools making cuts to busing, staffing, extra-curriculars as state places district in ‘fiscal caution’ (WKYC)

• Financial health of local school districts varies considerably, driving levy debates (Dayton Daily News)

• Akron Public Schools proposes cutting 285 positions to contend with budget deficit (Ideastream)

• Federal Hocking School District plans to reduce deficit through attrition (Athens County Independent)

• This school district is facing an $81 million deficit. It hopes voters will help. (WEWS)

• Cuts and budget reductions expected for Youngstown City School District due to projected deficit (WFMJ)

• Youngstown schools to cut 20 positions to deal with budget deficit (Ideastream)

• Cleveland Municipal School District plans to cut $168 million from budget over two years (Cleveland.com)

• Local school district forced to cut jobs due to budget deficit (WHIO)

• Tri-State school districts are making cuts, financial changes after levies failed in November’s election (WCPO)

• Mansfield City Schools faces $3.9 million deficit next school year (Richland Source)

• Reynoldsburg school levy fails, budget cuts likely (WCMH)

• Milford Schools approves over $5 million in budget cuts contingent on Election Day income tax levy failure (WLWT)

• Milford School District tax levy fails (WCPO)

I’m going to stop here because I could go on and on with these.

I read an abnormal amount of local news from all around Ohio, so I know this all is happening because I see these headlines all the time. I don’t expect most Ohioans to be aware that school districts everywhere across the state are facing such terrible trouble, but I do expect the Ohio House Speaker to know it, because, well, that’s his job.

What I can’t understand is this: If you know that public school districts across Ohio are facing awful budget hardship, teacher shortages, morale problems, busing problems and driver shortages, an extremely hostile public, a complete unwillingness in many communities to pass local levies, would you, as Ohio House Speaker, try to find ways to help schools give 90% of students the absolute best education possible? Or would you rip away more resources and make their problems worse?

I would try to help.

I hope most people would try to help.

But Matt Huffman is signaling he intends to cause them more pain. And that’s why I wonder, does he hate public schools? Or, does he not care about them? Or does he just love private, for-profit, and religious schools so much that it doesn’t matter to him what happens to the 90% of students in public schools?

I don’t know. But if state lawmakers cut even more from public schools, all these headlines will keep getting worse, and Ohio communities, schools, teachers, students and families will all suffer the consequences.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Why Can’t Ohio Republican Legislators and the DeWine Administration Leave LGBTQ People Alone?

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By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used by Permission

I’ve lived in Ohio for nearly four decades and for that entire time, LGBTQ+ lives have been treated by our politicians as little more than a convenient political punching bag. Every year I ask myself, why can’t they just leave us alone?

I turned 18 in late 2002, so my first non-local election as a voter was in 2004, when the George W. Bush campaign juiced his reelection prospects by putting same-sex marriage bans on the ballot and passing them in 11 states, including Ohio.

Welcome to politics, kid, you’re a second-class citizen. That’s the message Ohio welcomed me with as a voter.

It was easy in 2004 to scapegoat and victimize the entire LGBTQ+ community, not just segments of it as we largely see today. We were going to destroy traditional marriage. We were — by seeking the same legal benefits of marriage afforded to opposite-sex couples — going to destroy the entire country. Marriages to farm animals are coming next, they shrieked. “Fire and brimstone… Forty years of darkness… Dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!”

It took 11 years for Ohio’s same-sex marriage ban to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, a case originating out of Ohio.

The state of Ohio, under then-Attorney General Mike DeWine, cost taxpayers more than a million dollars working to keep myself and the rest of my LGBTQ+ family second-class citizens, undeserving of the same legal protections as everyone else.

But over those years, the tide had begun to turn. One of the most significant things I learned after 2004 was that many people changed their minds on the issue of LGBTQ+ rights when somebody close to them came out as LGBTQ+. Of course, plenty of others reject their LGBTQ+ family members: disowning us, kicking us out of our homes, or even doing violence to us. But as enough of us came out and showed that we are normal, everyday people with real humanity, the mood of the country slowly changed.

Ohio’s same-sex marriage ban of 2004 was passed by 61.7% of voters. A 2012 poll by the Washington Post showed 52% of Ohio residents saying that same-sex marriage should be legal. A 2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll showed a 56% majority in favor of same-sex marriage in Ohio. A 2022 survey by the same institute showed 70% of Ohio respondents supported same-sex marriage.

And yet, still, Ohio Revised Code Section 3101.01 states “Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state.”

So if the current right-wing U.S. Supreme Court decides to overturn the Obergefell decision and return it to the states, LGBTQ+ Ohioans would once again be relegated to second-class citizenship against the wishes of 70% of the public.

In the last several years, because of this shift in public opinion, right-wing operatives have decided it’s more politically convenient and publicly palatable to shine their spotlight of hatred, lies, and intolerance not on the LGBTQ+ community broadly, but on our transgender brothers and sisters specifically.

Since 2015, the U.S. has seen a sharp increase in anti-trans legislation, with record-breaking numbers the last four years. In 2023, 550 anti-transgender bills were introduced across the U.S., more than in the past eight years combined.

Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered state legislature has gone full-bore into the play: introducing anti-trans athlete bills, anti-transgender health care bills, and even anti-drag and bathroom ban laws. They passed the youth athlete and gender-affirming care ban just before the end of the year. DeWine vetoed it, but the lege now looks to make their first order of business in 2024 attacking trans people next week with a possible override of DeWine’s veto.

DeWine said during his press conference last week that, “Parents looked me in the eye and they said, ‘My child would be dead if they had not received this care.” DeWine did his research, he listened to families and doctors, and he showed more honesty and compassion in a 30-minute presser than I saw out of Statehouse Republican lawmakers in all of 2023.

The fact that this is a matter of life and death is obvious to those of us who know and love and care about trans and other LGBTQ+ people in our lives. I’ve heard too many awful stories. My heart has been broken over and over knowing what those in my LGBTQ+ family have had to endure: the fear, the lack of safety, the horror stories of pain, violence, and rejection from a society that has historically not given a damn about us or our lives.

But our LGBTQ+ family is strong. We’ve created communities for ourselves. We’ve worked with medical professionals to create health care spaces for ourselves, when much of the rest of the world was dismissing us and laughing at us, even amid the AIDS epidemic. We created spaces for ourselves where we could live in peace, not fearing for our safety and security, but lifting each other up in acceptance and love.

So no matter what happens next week, I want to send a very clear message to my LGBTQ+ family and especially our trans sisters and brothers: You are loved. You are accepted. You are appreciated. You are wanted, needed, and valued in our communities and in our families. Your individuality is a gift, and your lives are precious. I will never abandon you and I will never stop fighting for all of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To our allies, thank you. Truly, thank you. Your strength and alliance carries far more weight than you might conceive.

And to the small-minded, closed-hearted bigots who seek to rob us of our inalienable rights, to scapegoat us, to ostracize us, to “other” us, to exclude us, to lie about us, to victimize us, to use our lives as a political cudgel whether out of cynicism or ignorance — perpetuating or being duped by propaganda: You’ve never cared about us, and we don’t need you, so honestly, why can’t you just leave us alone?

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Rejecting Ohio Issue 1 Would Bring Back a 6-Week Abortion Ban — With No Exceptions for Rape and Incest

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By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission.

For 82 days last year, the impacts of Ohio Republicans’ six-week abortion ban threw our state’s medical community and patients into chaos, confusion, and nightmare scenarios that made international headlines.

Ohio’s abortion ban law that includes no exceptions for rape or incest was held up in court after being signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019. It came crashing back following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Less than an hour after the decision, Attorney General Dave Yost filed to have a federal court lift an injunction on Ohio’s six-week ban. That night, the court granted the motion and DeWine signed an executive order permitting the Ohio Department of Health to set up rules for enforcement.

Three days later, a 10-year-old rape victim had to flee Ohio to Indiana for abortion care. The story made national news, but instead of acknowledging the devastating consequences of the extremist law Ohio Republicans had worked for decades to pass, they instead attempted to erase the 10-year-old’s story.

Yost went on Fox News to raise doubts about whether the story was true. Alex Triantafilou, who has since become the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, went on Twitter to call the case, “A garbage lie that a simple google search confirms is debunked.” Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted, “Another lie. Anyone surprised?”

The story was not a lie: On July 12, Columbus police arrested the rapist, confirming the story. This past summer, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Ohio Republicans’ radical abortion ban remained in place from June 24, 2022 until a Hamilton County Common Pleas Court judge issued a temporary restraining order against it on Sept. 14, 2022, and a preliminary injunction against it on Oct. 7, 2022. The Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court is now considering whether or not to lift that injunction while the Hamilton County case proceeds.

With the injunction currently still in place, abortion is legal in Ohio up until 22 weeks. If the Republican Ohio Supreme Court majority lifts the injunction, then Ohio’s six-week ban comes roaring back once again.

That is, unless Ohio voters decide to pass Issue 1 on Nov. 7, putting protections for reproductive rights such as abortion care, miscarriage care, contraception, fertility treatment, and continuing one’s pregnancy in the state constitution. The amendment would protect access to abortion care up to the point of fetal viability, and would only be allowed after that point to protect the life of the mother.

The nightmare scenarios during the nearly 12 weeks that Ohio’s extremist abortion ban was in place did not stop with the tragic story of the 10-year-old.

At least two more minors made pregnant by sexual assault were forced to leave Ohio to avoid having their rapists’ babies, according to sworn affidavits filed by doctors.

Ohio’s own abortion statistics show that it’s disturbingly possible for children to become impregnated. In 2022, 42 girls aged 14 and younger had abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. In 2021, it was 57. In 2020, it was 52. Ten-year-olds who become pregnant are by definition rape victims, but again, Ohio’s six-week abortion ban law doesn’t make exceptions for rape or incest.

The traumatic consequences of the law that prevented child rape victims from receiving abortion health care stretched well beyond them. The doctors’ affidavits also described more than two dozen other instances in which the abortion law put Ohio women under extreme duress.

They included two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant.

Other women had partially delivered fetuses too undeveloped to survive only to see the delivery stall. In that condition, with the fetus partly out, they had to sign paperwork — and then wait for 24 hours, or for the fetus’s heart to stop.

Women suffering other complications such as a detached umbilical cord faced similar intrusions just after they were devastated to learn they would lose a child they dearly wanted. They, too, had to wait a day or for fetal demise. In one instance, that took 14 hours, a doctor said.

Still other women — shattered to learn that the baby they’re carrying lacks vital organs necessary for survival — were told that in Ohio they had to carry that baby, possibly for months, only to see it be stillborn, or to watch it quickly die.

“Being forced to go down the path is just an unequivocal nightmare, especially if you think of someone going through an entire pregnancy against their will when they know the fetus is going to die,” said Dr. David Hackney, maternal fetal medicine specialist in the Cleveland area, and chair of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologist’s Ohio chapter.

In the affidavits, doctors described the scene as women and girls suddenly learned they couldn’t get the abortions they were planning on: Many cried inconsolably. Several threatened suicide. One woman said she’d drink bleach. A high school student who couldn’t stop vomiting was hospitalized and placed on suicide watch. One woman said she’d try to end her pregnancy by hurling herself down some stairs

Under the six-week ban, Ohio doctors faced potential felony criminal charges and risks to their medical licenses because of what they said are unclear regulations and specifications on abortion stemming from the law.

Doctors said that the six-week ban had them working against their Hippocratic oaths to do no harm.

“These are dire pregnancies,” said maternal fetal medicine doctor Tani Malhotra. The mothers “are so devastated as it is. And we are just re-traumatizing them over and over again. And it’s heartbreaking to watch them already going through the movements of accepting the loss that they’re about to have and then we come in and say ‘Sign these papers’ so we can add insult to injury.”

For doctors, when and whether the law permits abortions is not an academic exercise: If they violate it, they can be charged with felonies, be sued in civil court, and subjected to professional sanctions. Nevertheless, Yost failed to provide medical practitioners any legal guidance around the law.

The pain, suffering, chaos, and confusion described above is the reality that Ohioans experienced from June 24, 2022 until Sept. 14, 2022 under the six-week abortion ban that opponents of Ohio Issue 1 are fighting to keep as Ohio law.

Ohio voters now have less than 20 days to decide if they want to help revive that reality, or pass a proposed amendment that would prevent it.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

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