OHIO, DO WE STILL HAVE A SENSE OF DECENCY?
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“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
In 1954, attorney Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy that
question during the hearings that helped bring an end to McCarthy’s
political career.
Seventy-two years later, it is time to start asking that question again.
This week, a political attack video featuring Amy Acton’s estranged
mother brought the trauma of her childhood into Ohio’s governor’s
race.
I find this entire episode disgusting.
Someone decided that the suffering of a child could be repackaged as
political ammunition. That alone should stop us in our tracks.
The Ohio I grew up in would not have been calculating the political
points of whether childhood trauma made someone more or less
electable.
We would have been asking whether exploiting that trauma was decent in
the first place.
Vivek Ramaswamy has now confirmed that his campaign produced the
advertisement. His campaign has announced plans to spend $4 million
promoting it. When asked about the attack, his campaign called Amy
Acton a “serial fabulist” with “serious problems with the truth.”
I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to recognize her
humanity. And I don’t have to support Vivek Ramaswamy to hold his
campaign accountable for its own words and actions.
Matthew McConaughey recently said something that resonated with me:
“Independent is the original road.”
Before we were Republicans, Democrats, or Libertarians, we were
Americans. We were Ohioans. We were neighbors.
And being independent ought to mean having the courage to recognize
something is wrong without first calculating which political party
benefits from saying so.
Challenge a candidate’s policies. Question their public record. Debate
their vision for Ohio.
But surely we can do that without turning someone’s childhood
suffering into political ammunition.
Ohio, do we still have a sense of decency?
Ron Grethel
Libertarian candidate, Ohio House District 62
Army veteran and Loveland-area resident
Agree or disagree, join the conversation by emailing news@lovelanddaily.com
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