Ohio’s Message to Florida: There’s Still Hope for Democracy

By Diane Roberts

Let’s talk about Ohio. No, really.

Seven presidents were born in Ohio, all Republicans, two of whom were assassinated.




Ohio has produced a number of dubious politicians, including the shouty Rep. Jim Jordan and the faux-billy Sen. J.D. Vance, who sometimes pretends he’s from Kentucky.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sometimes pretends he’s from Ohio, but he isn’t. Still, he claims it as his spiritual home: “I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” he says in his memoir, “but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working, and America-loving.”

Obviously, they don’t work, fear God, or love America in the decadent fleshpots of Pinellas County.

Nevertheless, Ohio has much to be proud of: brilliant writers such as Toni Morrison; renowned actors, including George Clooney and Paul Newman; and the great funkster Bootsy Collins.

Now we can add Ohio’s defiant embrace of democracy to the list of good stuff from the Buckeye State. On Aug. 8, voters in this allegedly red state rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed measure to make it harder for citizens to amend their constitution.




The “No’s” prevailed: 57 to 43 percent.

Unlike Florida, where 60 percent must approve a ballot measure, in Ohio the standard is 50 percent plus one. Terrified that an amendment giving women — not Gilead Republicans — control over their reproductive health would pass in November, Ohio’s right-wingers figured they’d change the rules in the middle of the game.

‘Special interests’

Nobody bought the Republicans’ story that the state constitution should be held sacred, touched only by gerrymandered legislators and not amended willy-nilly by a rabble of ordinary folks laboring under the delusion that the government should work for them.

Republicans charged out-of-state “special interests” with funding the campaign to beat Issue 1: more than $14 million from voting rights groups, teachers’ unions, and others.

Of course, proponents of Issue 1 also got that sweet out-of-state special-interest cash, too, including $4 million from the Illinois container magnate Richard Uihlein and his wife.

They’re reactionary super-donors and supporters of both Donald Trump and Alabama’s Roy Moore, those noted connoisseurs of teen pulchritude.




But this is not about the integrity of the state constitution. It’s about abortion.

Some politicians pretended otherwise, but Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said the quiet part out loud: “It’s 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

Ohio bans abortion after six weeks which, since you rarely know you’re pregnant at that point, amounts to a total ban.

Cruelty

As has been pointed out over and over, for Republicans, the cruelty is the point.

In 2022, a 27 year-old man raped a 10 year-old Ohio girl and got her pregnant. She had to travel to Indiana to get medical attention.

Ohio Republicans wondered if it was even possible for a 10-year-old to get pregnant. Congressman Jim Jordan suggested the story was fake. If it wasn’t fake, well, that rape was part of God’s plan.

And why didn’t the media report that it was some undocumented guy who attacked her? Surely that was the important part of the story.

Voters in Michigan, California, and Vermont have chosen to put reproductive rights in their constitutions. Voters in Kansas and Kentucky rejected measures saying their state constitutions forbade abortion.

Anti-choicers figured they’d better move fast in Ohio, before citizens even had a chance to vote on the abortion amendment. They scheduled the special election on Issue 1 for August, when people were on vacation, college students not yet back for fall semester, and it would be so hot everybody’d be concentrating on surviving that Chinese hoax, not thinking about politics.




Thing is, women (and plenty of men) get pretty motivated when it comes to their own bodies. Despite Republicans’ best efforts, turnout was high — or comparatively high: 38 percent.

Obviously, nobody can predict what will happen when Ohioans vote on the pro-choice constitutional amendment in November. But, given this result, sanity might prevail and Ohio women will be protected from the creepy people who want to get all up in their uteruses.

A breakdown of the vote shows that 15 counties that went for Trump in the 2020 election voted “No” on Issue 1. A decent number of Republican women also favor reproductive freedom.

In Florida

Here in Florida, there’s a petition drive to pass a similar constitutional amendment. It says, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”

Organizers have said they’ve collected nearly half a million signatures they need to put the proposal on next year’s ballot.

To pass here, the measure needs the approval of 60 percent of voters. That is tough, but things could get worse in the future.

Some Republicans want the threshold raised to 66.67 percent. A bill mandating that change be put to a constitutional vote died in committee this past legislative session; however, like so many very bad ideas cherished by the venal dolts who claim to represent us, it is likely to be back next year.

Still, there’s reason to hope. Ohio’s state government, like Florida’s, is entirely owned by Republican extremists. But the abortion issue may slow their plans to turn America into a white Christo-fascist autocracy.

Women are angry. Women are motivated. Watch this space.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.