So it was shocking -- in a good way, for once -- to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:
“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most -- the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”
DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists -- parents’ rights -- was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.