Free speech showdown and the future of small-town America
Plus: a lot of really good news
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Apologies for being a day or two late with the latest newsletter; we’ve had a nasty cold virus of daycare origin going around the apartment and nobody was spared. Because I’m incapable of not feeling guilt, I want to make it up to you by offering a 20% discount on new paid subscriptions (see below).
Tonight we’ll kick off with a big feature story, then jump over to headlines from what’s been an unusually positive news week thus far (fingers crossed that I didn’t just jinx it). Dick Durbin still hasn’t done anything about Clarence Thomas, but I won’t dwell on that tonight (we’ll launch a public pressure campaign next week, instead).
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All things considered, Tim Steinhelfer would rather not be talking about this.
With just six weeks to go before election day, Steinhelfer’s campaign continues to coexist with a legal battle that he only reluctantly joined this summer. The original plan was to spend all of the stretch run knocking on doors and talking to neighbors about his plans to grow the town’s economy and improve residents’ quality of life; now, Steinhelfer understands that his candidacy is just as tied to drag queens, jet skis, and Christmas parades.
But if Steinhelfer is running for mayor of Bellefontaine because he wants to transform the Rust Belt town where he grew up from a place where young people “sought to leave and never come back and saw that as an accomplishment,” the work has to begin with pushing back against the organized bigotry that chases people away and keeps newcomers from moving in.
And so with just a day before the deadline in August, Steinhelfer stepped up to file an objection to a proposed ballot initiative that would make the town of 14,000 people the first in Ohio to institute a draconian ban on drag shows.
The case wound its way through the Logan County board of elections, where a split vote between commissioners gave Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose the tie-breaking vote. LaRose, who tried to recast himself as a culture warrior ahead of his run for Senate, voted to place the proposed ordinance on the ballot.
Steinhelfer spent most of last week working on a 249-page appeal of LaRose’s decision, and early next month, the two sides will argue over the matter in front of the Ohio Supreme Court.
There are technical legal reasons why Steinhelfer believes the proposed initiative should be tossed out — namely that its sponsors committed fraud by quietly trying to turn it into a zoning ordinance — but adherence to local code isn’t the only motivation. Steinhelfer frequently takes on First Amendment cases, and this one is personal, too.
“It’s kind of a David and Goliath situation where you have a lawyer in his third year of practicing law going up against the state attorney general, but I think I'm going to beat him,” Steinhelfer, who won Logan County’s Lawyer of the Year award last year, predicts.
The saga began last December, at Bellefontaine’s annual Christmas parade. The event featured 40 different floats, one of which featured a local drag queen named Blond Vanity riding a jet ski. A few local hysterical conservatives, no doubt influenced by the national right-wing panic over drag performers, took great exception to the display, and soon enough, rumors began to fly around on Facebook, one more absurd than the next.
One resident insisted that Blond Vanity was gyrating and provocatively dressed (she wore a full-body elf costume), while another rumor going around claimed that her genitals were showing (again, she wore a full-body elf costume).
The spirit of inclusion so offended two conservative residents that they showed up at the first city council meeting of the new year to demand a new ordinance to ban future public appearances by drag queens.
A resident named Devin Palmer claimed that her 10-year-old son had “found a ticket during the parade with some content being advertised of a sexual nature,” while others even suggested that pamphlets on grooming were being handed out during the parade.
The reality was far less sordid: The Olive Tree, the jet ski float’s sponsor, handed out candy canes with a tag that promised “all were welcome” at the first-ever gay bar in Logan County. The tag also included a coupon for a parade afterparty, an event that was clearly marked as an 18+ gathering.
Here’s where the politics of this begin to become somewhat surprising. The drag ban proposal isn’t being led by longtime residents looking to hold onto the past, but instead more recent newcomers whose taste in cable news networks is unambiguous.
“The proponents of this are primarily what I call community outsiders, people who came here and sought this place out to escape what they call ‘metropolitan values,’” Steinhelfer says. “It's a weird term. I don't know what she means by it.”
He was being facetious, of course; the statement dripped with culture war, even with its quaint terminology. Danielle Stefaniszyn, who joined Palmer to protest the drag performances at that first city council meeting, made it a bit more unequivocal when she urged the council to “preserve Bellefontaine and make more towns like us.”
What she didn’t expect was for so many people in Bellafontaine to speak out in support of The Olive Tree at the next council meeting, which took place two weeks later. The event was so packed — it was probably record attendance, but they don’t track such things — that it required an overflow room for interested parties.
A record number of people showed up at the subsequent council meeting, with a vast majority of them there to protest any sort of ban. More than a dozen gay, trans and cis-straight allies spoke out about the importance of acceptance and how The Olive Tree created a sense of welcoming and community that they felt the town had been missing.
During the hearing, a transgender man named Samson Bates, who was born and raised in Bellefontaine, said that he’d seen “countless friends leave this town because those small town values told them they were sick, deranged and wrong for wanting to live authentically.”
Kelitha Hogue, who called herself an LGBTQ+ ally, echoed the statement. “98% of the people that I went to school with who are LGBTQ no longer live in this community,” she said. “Why? Because of the bigotry. The way that we treated them, they had to escape.”
The conservatives’ appeal to lawmakers failed — “obviously, the city council does not take any such blatantly unconstitutional actions,” Steinhefler says — and so they went to work collecting signatures for a ballot initiative.
In July, Republicans in the legislature introduced a bill that lumps drag in with adult entertainment such as strip clubs and porn theaters, making Ohio one of 16 states where bans on drag shows have made it to the State House floor. A federal judge today ruled Texas’s drag ban unconstitutional, which may put a hold on the proposal in Ohio, but that is in some ways besides the point. For Steinhelfer, simply stopping the community from making such a hateful statement is the key to progress.
Bellefontaine was a railroad town that was at its most prosperous about a century ago. It’s now mostly serviced by big box stores and strip malls, while a nonunion Honda plant a county over provides a fair number of local jobs.
Residents worry whether it’ll disappear entirely within the next few generations, a concern that is central to Steinhelfer’s actual agenda. Many of the old, beautiful buildings in the historic downtown have been preserved by a developer in recent years, providing space for new restaurants and stores, as well as Steinhelfer’s office. The great-great grandson of local union rail workers, he’s got a personal stake in seeing the rest of the town receive the same careful planning intervention.
“I'm running to focus on the neighborhoods because they’ve been neglected,” he says. “Now that we have a vibrant downtown, I want to focus on the neighborhoods and make sure that when we build, we're building on New Urbanism principles, making walkable neighborhoods instead of cars, Ubers and ugly sprawl.”
It’s a far cry from the culture wars that he’s been forced to fight, but consistent with his other work. Before he went to law school, Steinhelfer worked as a teachers’ union organizer in New Orleans, where public education was decimated as the city was cobbled back together after Hurricane Katrina. Being in New Orleans — he also went to law school at Tulane — was instructive in his vision for Bellefontaine’s central planning and development.
“I want to turn [the exodus] around and get rid of this thoughtlessness in our city government that leads to sprawl and unwalkable neighborhoods and ugliness,” he says, “and make this a place that people are proud to be from, and young entrepreneurs and remote workers want to choose to live in.”
No more handouts to large corporations, updated zoning laws, sensible planning that doesn’t block out pedestrians; cafes and delis in every neighborhood, to create a sense of belonging. And hopefully, no ban on free expression or an uneasiness born of bigotry.
Time to run through some good news — more coming for premium subscribers tomorrow evening!
Voting Rights:
The Supreme Court declined Alabama’s request to reinstate its racially gerrymandered Congressional maps, ending a gambit by the state to circumvent the court’s instruction to draw a second Black-majority district.
The court’s order came with no further explanation nor any notes of dissent from any justices. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh voted with the court’s three liberals to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a surprise decision that came with an important caveat: Kavanaugh wrote in a separate opinion that he did not think that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
Because Alabama didn’t raise that argument when making its case, Kavanaugh did not factor his skepticism of the long-term validity of race-based redistricting into his surprising decision. Alabama’s secretary of state, who comes from the same swamp as Kavanaugh and the other right-wing justices, tried to belatedly assert that argument in his appeal, but Kavanaugh didn’t bite.
Alabama’s attempt to submit a slightly less racist map that still didn’t create a second Black-majority district was rejected by a federal court earlier this month.
Reproductive rights:
Now that their strategy of throttling the ballot initiative and constitutional amendment process has proven to be a dud, red state Republicans have been trying to sabotage abortion rights amendments by filling the descriptions that voters will see with abject lies and biased language.
The jury is out on the misleading language filed by Ohio’s Frank LaRose (that guy again), but it’s not working out so well for his counterpart in Missouri, Jay Ashcroft. On Monday, a judge rejected and rewrote Ashcroft’s descriptions for all six potential pro-choice amendments seeking a place on the November 2024 ballot.
In his ruling, Beetem wrote that the problematic phrases Ashcroft used in his summary, which must be 100 words or less, include statements that the initiatives would allow “dangerous, unregulated and unrestricted abortions,” that abortion would be allowed “from conception to live birth” and could be performed by anyone “without requiring a medical license” or “potentially being subject to medical malpractice.”
Beetem wrote that he also found “that while the proposals have the greatest immediate impact on abortion, the absence of any reference to reproductive health care beyond is insufficient in that it would cause a voter to believe that abortion is the only health care comprising the initiatives.”
The amendments vary in how much protection they provide, which has sparked a lot of debate among pro-choice advocates in Missouri, but the judge’s rewriting sidesteps that debate.
California:
This is a Good News segment of the newsletter, so I’m going to hold off on commenting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s horrible veto of an important pro-worker, pro-safety regulation of driverless trucks.
Instead, I’ll praise him for signing a law to that makes it illegal for schools to ban schoolbooks based on their lessons on the history and contributions of people based on their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. I’ll also give him extra kudos for framing the law as a defense of freedom:
“From Temecula to Tallahassee, fringe ideologues across the country are attempting to whitewash history and ban books from schools,” Newsom said in a statement. “With this new law, we’re cementing California’s role as the true freedom state: a place where families — not political fanatics — have the freedom to decide what’s right for them.”
I’ve been harping on this framing for nearly two years now, and I’m glad to see Democrats (including President Biden) begin to pick up on it.
Labor:
Joe Biden entered the White House with designs on becoming the most pro-union president since FDR, and while that was admittedly a pretty low bar to clear, he took his support for organized labor to historic new heights on Tuesday by visiting the United Auto Workers’ picket line in Detroit.
The visit made Biden the first president in modern history to walk a picket line in support of striking workers. If that sounds hard to believe, given Democrats’ historic alliance with labor, well, that’s part of why it’s such a big deal. The party for too long treated unions like ATMs, props, and foot soldiers for campaigns that made empty promises to workers, leading to a both a massive decline in union density and working class support for the Democratic Party.
Biden’s efforts have coincided with a new militancy within organized labor that has included the overthrowing of leadership in several major unions. The Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien had big demands of the White House, which led to Biden rhetorically siding with the union in its contract fight with UPS, while the UAW’s new leader, Shawn Fain, has been even more of a hardliner. He’s refused to give Biden the UAW’s endorsement until leadership is satisfied with the support he’s provided to the union. This helped provide the impetus for his visit, which was also spurred along by Donald Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Michigan on Wednesday.
The visit itself won’t cause a sudden realignment that brings the entire working class back into the Democratic fold, but it’s an important statement of sincerity and intent. Even more critically, while some hack politicos and uber-wealthy donors clutched their pearls over the president appearing to choose sides in a strike, the actual mundanity of the visit, combined with the lack of any perceivable backlash, will have hopefully sent the message to administration and other Democrats that there’s only upside to siding with working people.
Ironically, the visit also helped secure Fain’s fierce repudiation of Trump, who is trying to co-opt the movement by holding a rally of hand-picked scabs at a non-union plant that gives bonuses in creamsicle form.
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