CoolCleveland.com
Posted March 9th 2016
OHIO REPRESENTATIVE GRETA JOHNSON D-AKRON RALLY AGAINST KASICH DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD
As the Republican presidential primary has gone off the rails, with a hate-mongering reality TV star and a theocratic extremist leading the pack, the media and pundits have been casting around desperately for a believable “moderate” they can try to prop up. And many of them have settled on Ohio Governor John Kasich. The New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News have all endorsed him in the GOP primary.
The big problem with maintaining this fiction about a “moderate” Kasich is Kasich himself. Kasich was blowing up in the headlines as infuriated women began to identify him as patronizing, sexist and misogynist. And they aren’t wrong.
To start with, as he promised, Kasich signed the bill passed by the legislature last month to defund Planned Parenthood, based on the debunked, fraudulent video that claimed to show the organization “sold baby parts.” This lie was gleefully glommed onto by the Republicans and one loathsome Democrat (Cleveland’s Bill Patmon) in the legislature to drive this awful bill which strips money from successful programs to treat STDs, do cancer screenings and reduce Ohio’s appalling infant mortality rate — something Kasich has given lip service to caring about.
Clearly, Kasich hoped this would slip by without much notice because he pulled the same thing he did in 2013 when he signed a budget bill loaded with abortion restrictions: he signed it without comment over a weekend, and in this case, in the depths of a weekend with two high-profile primaries dominating the discussion.
Luckily, he was wrong. His assault on women and on the excellent work done by Planned Parenthood was still festered in the news stream and it has rightfully come back to bite him. But even as people were waking up to the news morning and starting to spread it through their social networks with comments like “You stupid, self-centered, patriarchal piece of SHIT!!! Do you even KNOW what Planned Parenthood does?!,” Kasich was making a bad situation worse, revealing his condescending, gaffe-prone tendency many Ohioans are aware of but the national media is just learning about.
Speaking to a crowd in, he talked about his first run for the Ohio state legislature, saying, “How did I get elected? We just got an army of people, many women, who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and put up yard signs for me. All the way back, when you know things were different. Now you call homes and everybody’s out working. But at that time, early days, it was an army of women that really helped get me elected to the state senate.”
To Kasich’s ears, steeped in sexism and ’50s attitudes, it probably didn’t sound jarring but it sure did to a lot of other people. This is the same Kasich who, back in 2012, said, “It’s not easy to be a spouse of an elected official. You know, they’re at home, doing the laundry and doing so many things while we’re up here on the stage getting applause, right?” So it’s clear this is not a slip but an engrained way of thinking about women that’s stuck in the past — a past in which Eisenhower is still president, Father always knows best, and white people could live, go to school and work without ever being troubled by seeing darker faces. Kasich’s nostalgia for a bygone age seems to color all his clueless references to women. And it certainly makes his homey, heart-warming stories about his humble upbringing seem a little less benign.
And certainly, his ruthless, aggressive attacks on women’s reproductive freedom — Ohio has passed more anti-choice laws under Kasich than any state in the U.S. — are not benign at all. Having children is one of the main drivers of poverty among women, and some women decide to have an abortion because they feel they are not economically able to have another child (The majority of women who seek an abortion already have children).
Meanwhile, in Kasich’s Ohio, poverty has increased, wages have decreased, taxes on working people have skyrocketed to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, and the middle class is disappearing. Planned Parenthood is often the only place women without means can go to do what they need to do to prevent getting pregnant and needing an abortion in the first place. And it’s hard to even wrap your mind around the deliberate hard-heartedness of someone who would destroy a program to prevent infant mortality based entirely on fiction, especially coming from a person who has been out on the campaign trail exuding a cloud of pretty words designed to make him appear to be a kinder, gentler sort of candidate.
But actions speak louder than words. Based on a lie (actually, two lies, since none of this funding is connected to abortion in any way), John Kasich has signed into law a bill that hurts women’s health, challenges their economic security and hampers their ability to make decisions for their own lives. There’s nothing “moderate” about that.