Ohio is solidly Republican, thanks to Donald Trump’s success in winning over manufacturing workers and rural Americans, and it has a Republican governor with veto-proof majorities in its House and Senate. Yet on Friday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill that would have protected girls’ sports from invasion by biological males and protected children from mutilation by transgender operations and treatments.
Ohio’s HB 68 is similar to what has already passed in about two dozen other states, including its neighbors of Indiana and Kentucky, each of which overrode its governor’s veto to enact a similar bill. Kentucky’s law has already been upheld by the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Cincinnati and presides over Ohio.
The bill passed with more than the 60% threshold required to override a veto. While all those legislators should have immediately criticized DeWine’s veto, the strongest rebuke of DeWine came from Trump himself.
“DeWine has fallen to the Radical Left,” Trump observed on his platform Truth Social. “No wonder he gets loudly booed in Ohio every time I introduce him at Rallies, but I won’t be introducing him anymore. I’m finished with this ‘stiff,’” Trump added.
“What was he thinking,” Trump continued in reference to DeWine and his veto. “The bill would have stopped child mutilation and prevented men from playing in women’s sports. The legislature will hopefully overturn it. Do it FAST!!!”
Yet DeWine added insult to injury by adopting the style of flawed reasoning by the Left in order to justify his veto, as he caved in to those who profit from these lucrative decisions. DeWine said he was deferring to the decision-making by a child’s medical team.
Life-changing operations on minors are not properly authorized by those who profit from performing them. As explained by Dr. Ben Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, “There’s a reason why they’re called minors. They don’t really know a lot of things, and they learn over the course of time as they become mature.”
“I would absolutely, adamantly refuse, in all circumstances,” Carson said about performing transgender procedures on minors. Carson added that “I suspect that in the future, we will look back on this period of transgenderism and say, ‘How could those people be so foolish?’”
Gov. DeWine cited none of the eminent authorities who favor protecting minors against life-ruining treatment. Instead, he said that “parents have looked me in the eye and have told me that, but for this treatment, their child would be dead.”
No child has ever died for lack of a sex change, while on the other side of the ledger is the immense harm that Gov. DeWine ignored. Minors subjected to transgender procedures and treatments are deprived of ever having natural families of their own, and some who regretted their treatments have sued those who performed them.
“Ultimately, I think this is about protecting human life,” DeWine declared with a straight face as he opened the floodgates to a billion-dollar industry to exploit the mutilation of children. He then promised to issue new regulations, but they would not protect children in any meaningful way.
As to the sports issue, Gov. DeWine provided no justification for opening girls’ locker rooms and athletic competitions to boys. DeWine previously declared that decisions about sports should be left up to leagues like the NCAA, which profits from allowing transgenders to compete while pandering to the liberal media that controls its lucrative television contracts.
Three petitions for cert are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on similar bills enacted in Tennessee and Kentucky, which have until early February to respond. The petition against the good Tennessee law states, “The Sixth Circuit’s decision deepens an existing split with the Eighth Circuit” over a similar law in Arkansas.
But the Eighth Circuit, which sits primarily in St. Louis while presiding over seven Midwestern states, subsequently agreed to a rare initial en banc hearing of the Arkansas law banning transgender operations. That suggests the Republican majority on the Eighth Circuit will agree with the Sixth Circuit and uphold this type of law.
The U.S. Supreme Court has dodged this issue when brought to it by the conservative side, and the Left may feel emboldened that it can win at the High Court. Amid so much judicial chaos over Trump-related issues, the annual end-of-year report by Chief Justice John Roberts was devoted to silly speculation about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).
Fortunately, several U.S. Courts of Appeals throughout the middle and southern regions of our country are upholding laws against transgender procedures and boys competing in girls' sports. In addition to the Sixth and Eighth Circuits, the Eleventh Circuit ruled in favor of Alabama’s law protecting children from the trans industry.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
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