In response to a ballot initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in Ohio, the GOP has called a special election to take place in August as a last-ditch effort to raise the threshold for any ballot measure to pass from a simple majority to a supermajority. Protect Women Ohio, a group which aims to thwart the ballot measure on abortion, recently released its first TV ad, which doesn’t mention the word “abortion,” but instead shows a drag queen story hour and a “gender unicorn” in an attempt to scare voters into voting “yes” on the anti-democratic amendment.
“When I say transphobia is a threat to democracy, I mean anti-abortion activists are using drag queens to scare Ohio voters into making it harder to amend the state [Constitution] and protect abortion rights,” Gillian Branstetter, Communications Strategist at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project, said on Twitter in response to the TV ad.
The ad, which cost the group $2 million on top of the $1 million already spent on radio and online advertising, opens with a young girl being tucked into bed. The female narrator warns that “out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads” and that the viewer can “keep the madness out of Ohio classrooms” by voting “yes” at the special election.
The ad does not mention the abortion amendment, which would give individuals the right to “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.” Ohio abortion advocates have collected more than 700,000 signatures so far in hopes of getting the abortion measure on the ballot in November.
This legislative session, the Ohio House passed bills that would prevent doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth and ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Neo-Nazis have also targeted multiple drag queen events in the state since March, with non-affiliated protesters standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hate groups such as the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front.
The attacks on transgender lives and drag queen cultural events are inherently connected to draconian bans on abortion and, in many cases, are being drafted and lobbied for by the exact same conservative groups. One of these right-wing groups, Moms for Liberty, has been named an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As Moira Donegan explained in The Guardian,
The bills are part of the same project by conservatives, who have been emboldened in their campaign of gender revanchism in the wake of Dobbs. Both abortion bans and transition care bans further the same goal: to transform the social category of gender into an enforceable legal status, linked to the sexed body at birth and to prescribe a narrow and claustrophobic view of what that gender status must mean.
Despite the transphobic fearmongering by Ohio conservatives, abortion advocates refuse to back down.
“Grassroots leaders in Ohio are fighting every day to protect the integrity of our democracy in Ohio. We will not tolerate a narrow vision of the U.S. that embraces just one community or one perspective,” Prentiss Haney, co-director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, wrote for Truthout. “All must be welcome here.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 143 new monthly donors before midnight tonight.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy