Ohio GOP’s Last-Minute Manipulations to Save Ramaswamy’s Campaign

[0:05] The Ohio legislature left for their summer break, but before they left, they made sure to do what they could to shore up Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor since he is in a tie with the Democrat in a state won by Trump three times and by 11 points in 2024.

[0:24] They jumped on the Medicaid fraud bandwagon, messed with their elections again, and hoped that we forgot about the Trump-Epstein files. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[1:00] Here in 2026, Ohio is having a governor’s race. Mike DeWine, the current governor, is term limited. So at the end of his term, at the end of this year, he is moving on to greener pastures, probably to be a lobbyist for some organization somewhere and making a lot of money on the speaking circuit. Who knows? Or maybe him and Fran are just going to go on vacation. So we got to have a new governor. And there are two candidates that are running that passed the primary. We have for the Democrats, we have Dr. Amy Acton, who I’ve talked about previously. She was the director of the Department of State, the Ohio Department of Health, during the initial opening, initial stages of the pandemic back in 2020.

[1:51] She was forced to resign in 2020 because they wanted her to lie about, the pandemic so that they could open up the businesses when the Republicans stopped listening to the science, which was probably within a couple of months after it started. And they wanted her to sign some orders that she didn’t feel were ethically, something that she should sign, so she resigned instead. Also, the death threats and the people protesting outside her house at the time also played a part in it, which I can imagine would scare anybody if you had a bunch of MAGA people protesting outside your house. And then on the Republican side, we have Vivek Ramaswamy. He is an American citizen.

[2:43] Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories from some of the racist MAGA people. Ramaswamy is an American citizen. He was born in the United States. He grew up in Cincinnati. His parents were green card or had green cards at the time of his birth. So even the argument about him being illegal or, Trump has been wanting to get rid of birthright citizenship, even if that stuff went through, it wouldn’t affect Ramaswamy because, again, his parents had green cards. And that is one of the exceptions that they made in the executive order. Now, that’s not saying that they wouldn’t change it later on. But anyway. So you have that. You also have the fact that Ramswamy is a tech bro. He has never had a real job. You know, he’s never worked in a factory. He’s never done landscaping.

[3:46] Maybe he’s mowed a lawn, but he’s never made money from it. He made his money through the old-fashioned way on the backs of other people. There was a report out that there was an Alzheimer drug that a company that he controlled purchased that they were going to put out and kind of find out that the reason why, the biotech firm that sold it to them sold it was because it wasn’t viable. And he ended up fleecing some investors when they gave up on it. He’s also talked smack about Ohio workers, saying that they’re lazy. And he said that’s one reason why he moved his companies to Texas, because the Ohio worker was mediocre at best.

[4:39] Let’s see, what else? Oh, he doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t understand how coal works. I highlighted that in a previous story about him where he’s talking about getting the coal, building new coal power stations and how that’s not even going to be possible. And so then the other thing, too, is that a lot of, you know, Ohio’s legislature has been under the control of the Republicans since 2011. They’ve held every single office at least since 2015.

[5:17] And they have a supermajority in the legislature. So anything that the Republicans want to do, they can do without Democrats, without Democratic votes. And they’ve done pretty much everything that they’ve wanted to do without votes. And that’s hurt a lot of people. And we know that’s a fact because they have the gender affirming care ban and they tried to ban abortion and, you know, the good stuff. The stuff that nobody really cares about, except for religious extremists, Christian nationalists. You know, they want to do the drag ban. You know, they don’t want to do anything, to make things affordable. We had the bribery scandal with First Energy, the electric company in Northeast Ohio.

[6:03] Only two people have gone to jail for it. And it looks like even Mike DeWine and John Husted, who’s the current U.S. senator, was involved in that scheme and nothing’s happened to them. And so they like to think, because they are in charge of everything, that Ohio is a Republican state, you know, core, like red, red. And it’s not. It’s more purple because we have some deeply blue areas like Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Athens area down in southern Ohio. And the red parts of the state are rural, and they don’t have very many people that live there.

[6:48] But they’re able to win elections, and that’s just part of party politics. So these Republicans think that Ram Swamy, is going to be a slam dunk, while the polls tell a different story. One of the latest polls shows that Dr. Acton and Ram Swamy are statistically tied in many of the polls that have come out recently. They’re each about 48, 47 percent apart. And it’s within the margin of error. The margin of error is like two or three points. And so they’re statistically tied. And you’re like, how can that be? Well, part of it has to do with people think that Donald Trump is the worst president in the world, and he is, most corrupt. And that stain taints the Republican brand around the country. So that plays a part in it. The other thing that plays a part in it is that Ram Swamy is a foreigner who is a tech bro.

[7:56] And these bigots out in the country of Ohio don’t trust him. And so they’re not real enthusiastic about him. He has a chance to win. I think Dr. Acton has a chance to win as well. And they’ve tried to smear her every which way but loose. You know, talking about how she closed schools and and robbed kids of their education and blah, blah, blah, which wasn’t true. And I talked about that in a previous episode.

[8:22] So the latest thing that they’re doing now, if we remember from 2024, when J.D. Vance came to Springfield and talked about, the Haitian immigrants eating dogs and eating cats, and then it matriculated into the June presidential debate where Trump is standing there going, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs. So basically, they were using manipulation to kind of gin up some outrage that they thought would help their candidate. And in 2024, Kamala Harris lost to Trump in Ohio by 11 points. If you win by double digits, okay. Well, so Ramaswamy should not be statistically tied with Dr. Acton. He should have a pretty good sizable lead if we believe the Republicans, when they talk about how great they are and how Ohioans keep electing them, even though they gerrymandered the districts, and they’re trying to suppress the vote with all these anti-voting measures.

[9:37] And so there’s a couple of things that they’re doing to try to secure the victory for Ram Swamy. The first thing that they’re doing is they’re putting an amendment or trying to put, it hasn’t officially happened yet, but it probably will, put an Ohio constitutional amendment on the ballot to enshrine requiring a photo ID to vote.

[10:02] This amendment would also not obligate the legislature to allow early voting or mail-in voting, so we know that they’re going to get rid of it as soon as this amendment passes, if it passes. And so that’s one of the things they’re doing. So they’re trying to bring out people to vote and trying to bring out their base to come out to vote.

[10:29] And the second thing that they did was they had this big, big, huge press conference in Columbus and they had federal law enforcement. They had included Todd Blanche, who is the interim attorney general. They had Dr. Oz, who is the guy that’s in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. They had Kash Patel, the nominal person in charge of the FBI. And it says, federal law enforcement officials joined Ohio leaders to announce a slew of fraud busts. The national politicians praised Governor Mike DeWine for his work and dissed the GOP legislators who had been blaming him for allegations of Medicare fraud. Medicaid fraud. So that’s the big thing is they’re ginning up this outrage or trying to gin up this outrage for Medicaid fraud. Using that, now stay with me here, they’re trying to use that to encourage people to vote for them so they can take care of the fraud and get rid of the fraud, the Republicans. Even though the Republicans have been in charge of the statehouse since 2011. They’ve had every office in the state since at least 2015.

[11:45] But yet, they aren’t taking the blame for the fraud. They were trying to blame Governor DeWine because obviously, he can’t really, well, he’s fought back, but he’s leaving. He’s not running for re-election, so that’s like a safe person to blame instead of blaming themselves.

[12:05] So it said that at an event outside of Columbus, the state leaders stood side by side with federal politicians to announce charges against people accused of defrauding the government of millions of dollars. And you had Todd Blanche, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, David Yost was there. And there were major indictments with federal and state charges against nine defendants for allegedly defrauding the government of $42 million through Medicaid billing or COVID programs. And so basically, here’s the people that, these are the indictments that they got. A Butler County man charged with defrauding Ohio Medicaid to the tune of $12 million. Four people accused of using fake behavioral health services for children to get $30 million. An alleged $15 million romance scam that targeted elderly Americans. And then you had four people accused of submitting $1.4 million in fraudulent loan applications to the Paycheck Protection Program, which helped businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. So even if all these indictments are true and they should be true.

[13:13] You have only two that are related to directly related to Medicaid or Medicare. $42 million. So $42 million, that seems like a lot of money, right? Well, the total amount spent on Medicaid in Ohio in 2024 was about approximately $43 billion.

[13:40] That’s for Medicaid and Medicare combined. That’s the state share and the federal government share. So that $42 million is 0.0976744186%.

[13:55] Of that $43 billion, or if we round up, it is 0.1% at best, right? So that is statistically… Non-existent, not non-existent, but not a factor. It’s not going to keep anybody from getting benefits. Yeah, you still should go after fraud, but.

[14:23] It’s not the slam dunk that they think that it is and why they would have a press conference. Not to mention the fact that the legislator, The GOP legislators like Rob McCauley, who’s running with Ramswamy on the governor’s ticket, and House Speaker Matt Huffman are blaming DeWine for not doing their bidding when they were trying to lock down Medicaid and Medicare in the budget. But they are the ones that removed a committee whose sole purpose was to root out fraud in the Medicaid program. And so it says, since 2011, DeWine has helped get 2,378 Medicaid fraud indictments and 2,216 convictions. Altogether, $645 million has been recovered. That’s far better than the $42 million that they’re staking their claim on now. And again, the only reason why this is coming up in a supposed red state run by Republicans since 2011 is the fact that Ramswamy is in trouble, and needs boosting.

[15:44] Now, I don’t know if Trump’s going to probably show up. I know J.D. Vance has already come to the state to campaign for Ramswamy. I expect probably Trump’s going to show up as well. Because Ramswamy, he’s not going to be able to win this race entirely on his own or with his own money. They’re going to have to do some serious shenanigans for him to win. It’s that close. And that’s how much hope we have on the liberal side that maybe Dr. Acting can win. Now, do you think anything’s going to change if she does win? Probably not, because she’s going to veto stuff and they’re just going to overturn her veto. But the fact remains that she will be the governor. And now be at least one check on the state legislature. And maybe they’ll start working on stuff that actually matters to people, like the cost of living, electricity.

[16:48] And how to survive rents, things like that, stuff that people care about, rather than the constant abuse of trans people and women. Maybe we’ll be done with that. Who knows? But that’s why they’ve been raising a stink about fraud in Ohio, of all places, is because Ram Swami is in trouble in the governor’s race. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[17:43] If you’ve been following the news recently, you probably have been following the results in the California primaries. And you’ve also been listening to Trump and company complain about how long the counting is taking. And they’ve been suggesting that there’s been some shenanigans going on, especially after a failed reality star, Spencer Pratt, didn’t make the top two in the L.A. mayor’s race.

[18:14] And so there’s been a lot of disinformation about it, and it’s the common playbook that Republicans use when trying to cede distrust in the elections system that we have in this country. In fact, the Trump administration, the Department of Justice, they want to try to take over control of elections, which is not constitutional, but they’re trying to do it anyway. And here in Ohio, we have a Republican majority that’s been running the state, since 2011. They’ve had every major elective office since at least 2015. And that includes the Secretary of State, who currently is Frank LaRose, and he’s the one that runs the elections. And he crows every election, primary or general election, and says how safe and secure Ohio’s elections are, while also encouraging the supermajority Republicans in the state legislature, to continue to chip away at people’s rights to vote. Because that’s the thing. The Republicans don’t want you to vote. They think that they do better when people don’t vote, which is kind of true. So what they do is they try to do everything they can to suppress the vote.

[19:41] Some of the things that they’ve done here in Ohio, we have the photo ID law that went into effect in 2023. They passed a law banning undocumented immigrants from voting at all in any situation. I mean, they already couldn’t vote in federal elections, but some cities and other municipal entities allowed undocumented people to vote for tax issues, which I completely think should be legal. But they did that. We used to have a decent mail-in ballot.

[20:21] Limit of seven days that if it was postmarked on the day of the election, it had seven days to arrive to be counted. They got rid of that just recently. So now absentee ballots have to arrive on election day or they don’t get counted. We used to have a generous ballot curing process that if you didn’t have an ID or something was wrong and you had to vote provisional, you would get 10 days to cure your ballot. Now it’s three days or four days.

[20:56] Let’s say the election’s on a Tuesday, you have until that next Saturday to fix whatever was wrong. Like if you didn’t have your ID with you or something like that. So that’s what they’ve been doing. And they’ve been chipping away at these things on and on and on and on. And so now, on top of that, now, their candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, as I’ve mentioned in a previous segment, is in trouble. He’s statistically tied with the Democrat, Dr. Amy Acton, and they can’t have that. So they’re trying to do everything they can to gin up enthusiasm for their base to come out to vote. Because they believe that, and this is the one thing that they, one of their mantras is that your vote shouldn’t count unless it’s cast in person on election day. They don’t want to count anything else. So they try to do everything they can to get around that. And it’s taking them time because they have to actually pass laws. But one of the things that they’re trying to do now is enshrined.

[22:07] The photo ID requirement in the Ohio Constitution. That way it can’t be easily changed. And one of the examples that they use is Virginia. Virginia had a strict photo ID law. And then when the control of the legislature changed from Republican to Democrat, and they got a new governor, that is one of the laws that they changed and they went back to the old way. And so the Ohio GOP does not want that to happen. So they went through the process in the legislature of writing a constitutional amendment to put on the ballot for November. And I mentioned in a previous segment that it hadn’t passed yet. It has now passed. So it will show up in November. But there’s two problems with this amendment, first of all, their photo ID is not the silver bullet these election fetish people believe it to be. Okay. Photo IDs can be faked. And even though we have those new style real ID, things here in Ohio, they still can be faked. I saw a story from 2022 where police had seized a bunch of Ohio fake driver’s licenses.

[23:33] And you’re asking a poll worker who volunteers to work two times a year to be an expert on IDs. So, you know, if somebody wanted to use a fake ID to vote, which very rarely would have happened anyway, it’s not going to be impossible. Even if they put this in a law, even though they require it now, it’s not a secure way. All right. And again…

[24:02] The photo ID is only one segment of the verification process. The other verification process that poll workers use is you verify the person’s address and they have to sign the poll book. And then you compare signatures with what is on file. So that’s one of the problems with this constitutional amendment. The other problem is that the current state law that requires SWOTO ID also allows for people to obtain free state IDs to vote that they don’t have to pay a fee for.

[24:39] This amendment does not include that. So now they’re going to try to probably institute a poll tax, an indirect poll tax. The other problem with this amendment is that towards the end of the text of the amendment, it says that the state legislature is not required to allow early voting or, no-excuse absentee ballots. And I know for a fact that if that gets passed, that’s one of One of the first things that they’ll do is they’ll totally eliminate early voting, and they’ll get rid of the no excuse absentee ballots that people have enjoyed for for years. And they’ve been chipping at the early voting for quite some time. It used to be that because of a loophole, because they didn’t go through and do it correctly the first time, you could register the day that you could register to vote the day early voting started and then you could vote. And they did not like that at all. And so they changed that. They got rid of that. Then they cut back on early voting to, you used to be able to early vote.

[26:01] Up to the day before the general election. They got rid of that. So now it’s the weekend before, like Sunday before. There’s no early voting on Monday, and then you have the general election. So they cut that back. So I see them getting rid of early voting.

[26:23] So basically, if I could recommend to anybody is don’t vote for this amendment when it’s on the ballot, vote no, because that’s the thing is they are not doing this to secure the they’re not doing this to secure elections. And if you listen to Frank LaRose, it’s not needed because we have a model. He talks about how he’s run a model election system that should be the envy of the country. And everybody should use Ohio as an example. But then they come up and they say, oh, you know, it’s unsecure. We got to have these IDs. these IDs. The other thing that they also did was they passed another law just recently, just in the past week, that is going to require that you show a photo ID, a copy of your photo ID when you submit an absentee ballot, which is something that we’ve never had to do before. And again, it’s going to be a copy. It’s going to be a Xerox copy of a driver’s license.

[27:34] There is no rational reason to require a photo ID. There’s just no reason. It does not make elections more secure. It’s just one thing. The one thing that I do know does make elections secure is signing a poll book and having to compare signatures. And again, you know, we have here in Ohio, 8 million registered voters.

[28:04] And I don’t have any example, and they’ve never been able to, produce any examples of an election being affected by somebody or by a large number of people who are faking their identity to vote. It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t exist. And this is just one way of trying to suppress the vote, because they’re going to assume that the people that don’t have IDs are not going to vote for them. They don’t want your vote. And so they’re going to make it as hard as they can for you to vote. And then it came out this week, the other day, that the FBI raided the offices of a group that goes around in Cleveland to encourage people to register to vote. And that’s another thing that they’re doing is they’re trying to intimidate, nonprofits and other groups that try to better their community by getting people to vote and educate them. And so by having the FBI raid them, they’re trying to discredit them and trying to stop their work.

[29:17] And that’s the thing. And the reason why they are doing that here in Ohio, in what most Republicans believe is a Republican state, is because their guy for governor is in trouble. And Trump being so toxic to Republicans in general is they have to pull all these shenanigans that they’re doing. And they’ve done it before. When George W. Bush was in trouble in 2002, they put the same-sex marriage amendment on the ballot to try to bring out Republicans. And it worked. So that’s why they’re trying it again. But I think that Trump is just way too toxic. I think that it’s really making.

[30:11] Republicans less likely to turn out to vote. Because they would rather just stay home than have to hold their nose. Now, I’m not saying everybody is going to do that. There’s going to be at least 20 or 30 percent of the voting electorate that’s just going to come out and vote because they do all the time. But it’s the independents and other people, people on the fence, that probably are not going to vote for Republicans. And they probably, some of them can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat. So they’re just not going to vote. They’re going to stay home. And that’s the worst possible outcome. So that’s why we expect these shenanigans from the Ohio GOP, because it’s part of their playbook. That’s what they like to do. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either complement a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets at secularleft.substack.com and it is totally free.

[31:25] One of the stories that has riled the Freethought community recently is that, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, followed through on his plan to strip a majority of religions from the official list of religions that the U.S. Military recognizes. If your religion was on this list, then you could go to your chaplain or whatever they have set up, and they would have to address your religion or whatever, whatever. I thought it was stupid anyway to have that, but that’s what it was. So there was like 130, 140 religions on the recognized list. And Pete Hegseth is an evangelical Christian, and he reduced it down to, I think it was like 31.

[32:25] And one of the religions that he left off was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. They did not recognize the Mormons, which is kind of ironic because the Mormons and the evangelicals have been allies for many, many years for social issues like abortion. And they used to work together with the Boy Scouts, although the Mormons recently quit the Boy Scouts.

[33:01] And so it was just kind of ironic that Evangelical Pete would strip the Mormons of their recognition. So I believe it was Senator Mike Lee in the U.S. Senate, who is a member of the Mormon Church, raised holy heck about it and complained and complained and complained. And so what they did was, what it was is it didn’t surprise me that, Pete Hegseth did that because evangelical Christians, and these are the people that don’t believe that women should have the vote and that men should lead their families, et cetera, et cetera, everything that Pete believes in. But these evangelicals don’t believe Mormons are Christians. They believe it’s a wackadoodle religion or wackadoodle church.

[34:00] Now, being an atheist, I think it’s all wackadoodle, but that’s what the evangelicals think is Mormons are not Christian. So that’s why they got left off the list. And so the senator, Mike Lee, raised a conniption fit about it, called Donald Trump personally to get them to change it. And eventually they did. but in a funny twisty way.

[34:32] So what the Department of Defense did is they restored Mormonism to the list of recognized religions, but what they did was they removed the Christian label from the list of religions, that were originally under the Christian label. So they included Mormonism in a list of recognized religions, but they still twisted it and would not label it as Christian. And what was also funny about it was that Mike Lee then crowed about it in a press release and claimed a victory that he got the Department of Defense to recognize Mormon, got it restored to their list, even though, did he really win? I don’t think he really did. Because the Department of Defense still doesn’t believe that Mormonism is a Christian religion.

[35:33] And so I just thought that that was.

[35:37] Of all the crappy stuff Pete Hegseth has done since he became Secretary of Defense, and the fact that he is not even competent to run that department, it was just hysterical. I got so much joy out of it. I like it when, I love it when the religious extremists fight each other. It’s so much fun and I get immense pleasure out of it.

[36:18] One of the state law or proposed state laws that I’ve been promoting the last few months, it was Senate Bill 341 here in Ohio, and it would ban child marriage. Basically, it would change Ohio state law and require that both parties in a marriage be 18 years or older. And the reason being, there’s more than a couple of reasons. One is that child marriage is at least one vector used in human trafficking. In some countries, you have older men, sometimes old men, marrying underage girls in order to transport them to another country or another state. Because usually authorities don’t question a husband and wife traveling together. So you have that. The other thing that is a problem is you might have some, unethical parents selling off their children for money or drugs or some other kind of consideration, forcing them to get married in order to complete the transaction. You also have some religious sects that are like that.

[37:42] The Mormon church, well, not the official Mormon church, but one of the offshoot Mormon groups. That’s one of their things is they marry young girls. You also see that in some of the people that are called the travelers, the Irish clan people. They sometimes marry young girls off, And then the other reason to ban child marriage is that if a young girl under the age of 18 gets married, she basically has no power. She has no rights because in this country, in the United States, you don’t have very many powers unless you are over the age of 18, 18 and older, like signing a contract, getting divorced. You can’t get divorced unless you’re over 18.

[38:36] You can’t own property unless you’re over 18. And so you’ve got these young girls that don’t have any power that are in a power dynamic that they don’t get any benefit from. So that’s another reason why you should ban child marriage. So the advocacy group Unchained at Last from New Jersey worked with a couple of state legislators, a Democrat and a Republican, and got this Senate Bill 341 introduced. So it’s in the Judiciary Committee, and it had gone through four hearings. And I personally had submitted some written testimony in support of it. It got zero public opposition to it. Nobody wrote testimony opposing it. Nobody showed up in person to oppose it. Nothing. There was nothing in the record of the committee, the committee record, that there was any public opposition to this bill. So it got to the fourth.

[39:44] Hearing, and usually in Ohio, the fourth hearing is for anybody else that wants to comment about it. And then it was open for a possible vote. So I’m watching it on the Ohio channel, which is our legislature live stream, and the committee, and he introduces the bill. He asks if there’s anybody to talk about it, and he says, see you, nobody. And let’s move on. And then he moved on to the next bill, and I was shocked. I was like, what’s going on? He was supposed to get a vote. Nobody made a motion or anything. Come to find out afterwards that the bill was pulled from the committee’s agenda at the last minute.

[40:30] With no publicity, quietly. And it seemed that there was a group of senators, who requested that it be pulled, that they opposed it, that they were going to block it. And I only know of one person that publicly, one senator that publicly came out against it, and that was in a news article, and I’ll have the news article, about it put up on the show notes. But one of the arguments that I heard from the grapevine was that there were some senators concerned that it would, affect the Amish community. Ohio has a large Amish community through the central and northern part of the state, and they are an insular community. They don’t have electricity. In most cases, they don’t use electricity.

[41:28] They also have a thing about being photographed, so they don’t have photo IDs. Um, and they still use horse and buggies and they farm with, uh, ox and horses and, and they use, uh, old style implements, that sort of thing. And so the inference was that the Amish marry young, and if they pass this bill, it would keep them from doing it. Well, that just didn’t seem right to me. So I looked it up, and I looked it up, a couple of sources, some expert sources, and I’ll throw a couple links in the show notes about it, say that while the Amish do marry young, they do not marry underage girls. And the reason why they don’t marry underage girls is because in order to be married in the Amish church, both parties have to be baptized. And if you know, and I do because I live in Ohio, the Amish do not, they’re not baptized until they’re 18.

[42:37] They are allowed to sow their wild oats when they’re under 18, like 16, 17 years old. It’s called Rumsprunga, Springa, I’m probably pronouncing that crappily, but basically they’re allowed to do whatever they want. Um, some of them have car stereos connected in their buggies and they’re playing loud rock music and they go to concerts and stuff like that. And they get to do whatever they want to do for this period before they’re, before they turn 18. And when they turn 18, then they have a choice. They either join the church and get baptized, or they leave the community and go amongst the Englanders, as they call regular people. And so in order for a girl and a boy, in most cases it’s a girl and a boy, well, it’s a conservative church, so it’s going to be a girl and a boy. In order for them to get married in the church, both of them have to be baptized. And since they don’t get baptized until they’re 18, and they have to make that choice, most marriages in the Amish church occur when the couple is in their 20s.

[43:57] 22, 23 years old. That’s when they typically get married. And that is why this argument about this Senate Bill 341 was disingenuous, because they were just looking for an excuse to block this bill. So there was a backlash in the public and in the press. Unchained at last even did a protest. They We had a bunch of women that showed up on the steps of the statehouse dressed in wedding dresses with tape over their mouths to make a point, including the executive director. She showed up, got some major press, got in the newspapers.

[44:42] And so what happened was then the next committee hearing, the bill was considered and it was passed out of committee. And so we’re like, yay, victory. Not so fast. Not so fast there. Yes, it did get voted out of the committee where it went to the Senate floor and it died. It’s not dead dead, but it was not put on the calendar to be considered to vote. And late this week, the Ohio legislature went on their extended summer break. So they will not be back in session until probably after the November elections. What needs to happen is this bill needs to be voted on by the Senate, and then it would go to the House. But it’s just going to sit there and probably, die at the end of the session if nobody takes it up. And I think that was probably the way that they could do it to get rid of, to get it out of the news is to pass it out of committee and just hide it. And unfortunately, young girls in Ohio who are susceptible to being trafficked and abused and become a victim of older men marrying them.

[46:00] We’re not going to be able to stop it until this gets voted on.

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