Opinion: Ohio getting attention, not the good kind

"Ay, Oh, way to go Ohio."

Akron native Chrissie Hynde, front woman for The Pretenders, once wrote that refrain for a song titled: "My City Was Gone." She could do an update today called "My State Was Gone."

Our shared home state these days is providing material for late-night comedy show writers.

The Wrestlemania-style Republican U.S. Senate debate confrontation between candidates Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons in March made "Real Time With Bill Maher," among others. "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" last month recapped the $60 million corruption scheme to bail out an energy company that led to the arrest and then ouster last year of Ohio Republican House Speaker Larry Householder. Actor-filmmaker Don Cheadle was more succinct in a recent Tweet: "WTF is in the water in Ohio?"

What has happened is that years of gerrymandering and one-party rule have pushed Ohio politics further right, nearly past the edge of reason. Cheadle made his comment amid Ohio Legislature debates over since-approved legislation to respond to school shootings by arming school staff. This is not something teachers and administrators were clamoring for, given all the things that could go wrong by adding guns to classrooms, so Republican legislators provided their own theories of why it would work.

State Sen. George Lang of West Chester Township gave a rambling comparison to Sept. 11, 2001, saying there haven’t been similar widescale terrorist attacks with airplane pilots armed. The U.S. War on Terror, killing of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and dramatically enhanced airport security probably helped more, but why use logic to protect our children?

Majority House Whip Don Jones of Freeport chipped in with tales of how students would throw things at him when he was a teacher. One threw a chair.

"What happens if that chair would not have been a chair but would have been a gun?" asked Jones, who apparently was an unpopular teacher.

Bill sponsor Rep. Thomas Hall of Madison Township added his own non sequitur, recounting the quick response of his father, a school resource officer who was in an office when two students were shot and two others were injured in the Madison school cafeteria in 2016. His father later acknowledged he had never spoken to the teen shooter, who was arrested by an officer responding from off campus. If only the lunch ladies had been packing heat.

Asked on ABC-TV’s "The View" June 9 about Ohio’s plan to arm teachers while sharply reducing required weapons training, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called them "some of the stupidest proposals I’ve heard."

"Ohio Enacts Batshit Crazy Law Arming Teachers in the Classroom" headlined Vanity Fair online June 14.

One of Householder’s last political beneficiaries, Jean Schmidt of Loveland, has picked up in the Ohio House where she left off in Congress, where she was rebuked by colleagues for referring to a fellow member as a coward. Turned out Democratic Rep. John Murtha was a longtime U.S. Marine honored for his bravery in the Vietnam War.

She made The New York Post and The Washington Post, among other news outlets, for suggesting in April that carrying the product of a rape "is an opportunity" for a 13-year-old girl.

Schmidt, who was caught on camera while in Congress agreeing that the nation’s first Black president wasn’t constitutionally legitimate, also has been involved in the Republican obsession with critical race theory. CRT isn’t taught in K-12,  but the attack on it has been expanded by some to include teaching about diversity and inclusion.

Schmidt really happened, though, with her "Save Women’s Sports" bill that passed in the Ohio House this month. Aimed at rooting out transgender school athletes, it has alarmed people by potentially forcing an athlete to verify her sex if it’s questioned by a coach, competitor or parent by submitting to a full pelvic exam.

Besides columnists such as Nancy Armour of USA Today, it drew the attention of Becca Gillespy Peter, who runs a website called Pole Vault Power from Lopez Island, Washington. She began a Tweet thread with a photo of her 9-year-old daughter, saying: "Here is why I would never allow her to play middle or high school sports if we lived in Ohio…"

It quickly went viral, with more than 77,000 shares within three days.

"I am pleased that it helped raise awareness of this serious issue," the 39-year-old former high school and collegiate athlete and coach said via text June 7. She decried requiring children "to be sexually assaulted if they wanted to continue in elite sports," and spreading "false narratives" that athletic girls who don’t look feminine must be trans.

"It can be incredibly damaging for young girls to even be accused of being a boy, let alone the physical trauma that could come with the verification process," she texted.

While the bill might get changed or even scuttled before becoming law, one has to wonder what impact on Ohio’s image all this is having. I can’t imagine that recruiters for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble and other major Ohio employers are happy.

The legislators keep finding new targets. On June 1, the House passed a resolution urging that Canada be put on a religious freedom watch list.

We’re taking on the peaceful country that sent us Cincinnati Reds star Joey Votto?

O Canada! Oh, Way to Go, Ohio!

Dan Sewell is a member of The Enquirer Board of Contributors who retired last year from daily journalism but not from rooting for Joey Votto.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Opinion: Ohio getting attention, not the good kind