Clarity on Issue One
Confusion surrounding issue one is not by accident. Opponents understand that confused people won’t vote. They would rather abstain than vote wrong. In fact, one of my colleagues told me of an elderly lady who voted no by mistake and was overwhelmed in tears when she discovered her mistake. That’s why the liberal opposition is lacing their language with conservative soundbites in a red state. A little clarity will help all sides know how to vote according to their own values on this issue that was bipartisan only a few years ago.
A no vote will put the minority in charge of our state's most fundamental document, but you wouldn’t know that if you listened to them. Only 74% of Ohioans are registered to vote.[i] In the last seven gubernatorial elections, less than half of Ohio’s eligible voters showed up in most years. Only once did we reach past 53%. The lowest turnout was 40.65%. When you factor in unregistered adults, less than 20% of Ohio’s adults could change our constitution.[ii] That has the potential to be the tyranny of the minority.
No state in America has a lower threshold to change their constitution. When this standard was set a century ago, they assumed that passionate Ohioans would muster up volunteers to take on a popular issue that they could not get resolution on any other way and that those issues would be fundamental to the governance of our state. What they did not envision was kids from out of state being paid $25 an hour by Planned Parent to collect signatures. They would never have conceived of special interest groups spending millions of dollars on television, social media, and the airwaves spreading false information about their issues, conservative or liberal, knowing that they would only have to reach the mass markets in our major cities to get the job done. As a result, corporate interests have already embedded monopolies in our constitution by adding their very own addresses into the constitution.
Their current ploy for November, under the guise of women’s health, is to embed abortion at will for minors without parental consent into the constitution but that’s not all. With carefully crafted language that not only dodges the age of consent, it also states specifically that “reproductive health” is not limited to abortion. Sex and gender are also conspicuously absent from the language as well. Experts believe that this ambiguous language is an intentional effort to achieve their unstated goal of granting a constitutional right to drugs and even surgeries to provide sex changes for children.
You can see how crafty they can be when doing an end run around the legislators who are elected by a majority of the people. Voters select legislators to carefully vet legislation like this and screen for such ambiguous language and unintended consequences. If and when the legislators fail to represent the true values of their constituents, there is always an election around the corner. The same folks that vote us in can vote us out! That is accountability to the majority.
As you go to the polls on August 8, it is up to you to decide if our constitution deserves the careful protections that 60% will guarantee or if a simple majority of a small minority that shows up, should decide the fate of the entire state. A YES vote will add greater protections while a no vote will keep it vulnerable to the tyranny of the minority. However you vote, be sure to vote on August 8.