‘Christian’ lobbyists embrace Ohio Republican budget that guts programs to help the poor and hungry

Pro-family. Pro-life. Pro-children. Pro forma doublespeak from religious right-wingers who specialize in spinning oppressive fundamentalism as family-forward enlightenment.

Ohio’s largest religious right lobby (and permanent fixture at the Ohio Statehouse) spewed that bunk on a biblical scale in a recent online takeaway of the Ohio Senate budget passed last week.

“This is the most pro-family, pro-parent budget we’ve seen in years” gushed a lobbyist with the Center for Christian Virtue about a budget draft that dishes up unholy hell and hardship for countless Ohio families. 

But the CCV conveniently glossed over the slashed funding and eliminated programs part of the Ohio Senate Republicans’ budget that gutted efforts to bring down infant mortality rates, provide crucial continuous health care coverage to children up to age three, improve birth and maternal health outcomes with stable housing, increase notoriously low state eligibility rates for publicly funded child care, restore the proposed $1,000 per-child tax credit to give struggling low and middle-income families a financial lifeline with rising rent, food and child care costs.

The group’s spin doctor also ignored devastating budget hits to food banks that feed millions of Ohio families in all 88 counties of the state.

The operating budget before Senate and House negotiators would set food bank funding back to 2019 levels, about 23% less than what was spent this year in a state where nearly 1 in 3 Ohioans qualifies for help.

Feeding some of the poorest students in Ohio with free meals, even with a pared down funding request from an anti-hunger coalition, is not even on the table in current budget negotiations.  

Neither is fully funding public schools (especially those in high-poverty, low-performing districts) that serve the vast majority of Ohio students.

The Senate Republican budget version not only shortchanges the education of young Ohioans it also puts them at greater personal risk with inexplicable cuts in funding for overdose prevention, lead abatement programs, pediatric cancer search and a clean water initiative successfully improving community drinking water.

But when the Center for Christian Virtue — once designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — boasted that the Senate budget “protects children,” it didn’t mean from genuine threats such as drug addiction, lead poisoning, or malnutrition, but from “ideological agendas” that don’t align with the ideological extremes of the religious right.

“From safeguarding children from obscene content in libraries to affirming the biological reality of male and female to empowering families,” the CCV’s policy director proclaimed, the Senate-approved budget “puts parents back in the driver’s seat, protects children from harmful agendas, and affirms foundational truths that should have never been up for debate.”

Top of this list of so-called family-affirming budget provisions was the regressive (and expensive) flat tax proposal that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Ohioans at the expense of the poorest families in our state.

Instead of setting income tax rates based on people’s ability to pay, this special interest group endorsed a system that would enshrine even greater inequity in the tax system (the rich get richer) and force major cuts in income-tax revenue for education, health care, public safety, and more. 

Other proposals highlighted in service to the bogus CCV “pro-family” narrative included amending mandatory religious instruction release time policy in secular public schools to spread the gospel of religious groups, like the Ohio-based LifeWise Academy, on a near-weekly basis.

The Ohio Senate Republican plan would also require districts to allow LifeWise and other ministries to send participating students back to their home schools with goodies and other materials to distract and drum up business with pliable peers.

Additional budget items touted as “prioritizing the needs of Ohio families over activist interests” involved “requiring transparent abortion reporting, including earlier and more detailed disclosures,” creating a $5 million grant “for ultrasound machines at pregnancy resource centers” that present as health care clinics but “engage in purposely manipulative and deceptive practices that spread misinformation on sexual health and abortion” and the go-to transgender scapegoat of “prohibiting taxpayer funding for gender transition promotion (???) including in youth shelters and mental health services.” 

Their agenda seems to be about dominating political, cultural, and social life, not about serving the least among us with a hand up.

The CCV’s propaganda on the Ohio Senate budget as “a decisive step toward restoring what matters most: truth, freedom, and the fundamental role of the family in our society” falls apart with hard facts:

The cruel elimination of a Medicaid waiver that would have helped infants and young children access critical health care. The Medicaid trigger language in the Ohio House budget — kept by the Ohio Senate — that would wipe out health insurance for hundreds of thousands of working Ohioans.

It falls apart with indefensible budget cuts that would needlessly cripple the ability to reduce opioid overdoses or prevent kids from being poisoned by toxic lead or get food to hungry Ohio children and families or decrease the state’s unacceptably high infant mortality rates.

The Center for Christian Virtues embraced legislation that is not pro-family, pro-life, or pro-children in any merciful sense, but is ideologically compatible with its right wing agenda so high-fives all around, right? No matter who gets hurt?