Opinion: DeWine comes up empty on witch hunt

Cliff Schecter is the founder of Majority Ohio and a columnist for The Daily Beast. He’s a board member for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio but is speaking only for himself.

The author Salman Rushdie once correctly pointed out that “fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.”

Mike DeWine’s fundamentalism, wrapped in his latest baseless, biased and ideological attack on Planned Parenthood, is just one in a string of abuses of this power by our oleaginous attorney general. But it’s by far the most strikingly political and troubling in its corruption of our legal process. DeWine – Ohio’s top law enforcement officer, sworn to uphold justice for all – is behaving in a manner that is simply unacceptable for an elected official in a democratic republic.

And it must stop.

Buried in DeWine’s press conference late on Dec. 11 was the finding that after the Attorney General Office’s five-month investigation “our office has found no indication that fetal tissue is being sold” by Ohio’s Planned Parenthood organizations. Let me restate this for the cheap seats and the comment section.

DeWine’s “investigation” has produced nothing. Zilch. Nada. It has found evidence of wrongdoing in much the same way Donald Trump found New Jersey-based Muslims cheering on 9/11. DeWine’s only actual product from his ode to 1690s Salem, Massachusetts, has been enough hot air to take a zeppelin to the moon.

While this is something most already knew to be true, truth is not on DeWine’s to-do list. He ensured the investigation and ensuing press conference clearing Planned Parenthood was overwhelmed by his inflammatory diatribe – one full of misinformation about Ohio law and the methods used by Planned Parenthood’s contractors for medical materials disposal. What DeWine conveniently failed to mention during his rant was that medical facilities all over Ohio use contractors who employ the very same methods for fetal tissue. He also left out that the Ohio Department of Health has since 1975 accepted these methods as complying with Ohio law.

Meanwhile, DeWine is certainly consistent in putting his own misplaced sense of morality before the rights of Ohio citizens. He spent $1.3 million of our tax money to try to destroy the dream of a dying Cincinnati man, John Arthur, to be legally married to the person he loved in Ohio (Obergfell v. Hodges). God only knows what he spent in staff hours and travel costs to ignore his job as Ohio’s AG and hopscotch around the country attacking women’s right to birth control through insurance in the Hobby Lobby case.

Regarding DeWine’s current jihad, one might be inclined to ask, as was posed during another witch hunt in our history: At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

We’ve seen one madman murder a mom of two young children, a police officer and an Iraq War veteran in Colorado Springs because of hyper-charged flim flam about “baby parts.” Is it really worth the risk of more violence, Mr. DeWine, just to set yourself up furthest right on “life” in your gubernatorial primary in 2018?

I guess if women really want DeWine to care, they should do what White Hat Charter Management Co. did, and load up DeWine & Friends with campaign cash. Doing that suddenly turns you into Houdini, making all DeWine objections go poof and disappear.

Instead, we’re being taken for a ride on another of DeWine’s many taxpayer-funded hobby (lobby) horses, where what he lacks in evidence, he sure makes up for in rhetoric. But this time, Planned Parenthood has sued him, to protect abortion access in Ohio from his actual agenda: taking away women’s constitutionally guaranteed rights.

There is one thing that DeWine’s fundamentalism didn’t take into account: The terrific people who work at Planned Parenthood. We’ve survived demagoguery in the past, and many of us are committed to making sure we do again.

Planned Parenthood will keep providing great services to lower-income Ohioans, no matter what.