Defiant Ohio activists call for united front against legalized bigotry
A red state campaign aims to create a unique coalition
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Defiant Ohio activists unite against far-right hatred
Driven ever further to the right by gerrymandered state maps and escalating culture wars, lawmakers in Ohio have spent much of the past few years making life increasingly difficult for the state’s LGBTQ+ community. Now, the LGBTQ+ community is fighting back, not just for themselves, but on behalf of all Ohioans who have been cast aside, left behind, and made to suffer for who they are.
At 9 am on Wednesday, the state’s ballot board will decide whether to green light the Ohio Equal Rights Act, a proposed constitutional amendment that would enshrine explicit new legal protections for a wide range of Ohioans who face legal discrimination. Race and ethnicity, physical and mental health, military status, gender and sexuality — they’d all be shielded by the amendment, providing recourse against both state and private actors.
It’s a particularly urgent for Ohio’s trans community, which has come under repeated attack by Republican lawmakers since been late 2023, when the legislature passed a two-for-one ban on gender-affirming care and trans girls playing on girls sports teams. They’ve found their groove lately, creating parental notification laws that require schools to flag any lessons on gender and sexuality (essentially a kind of “Don’t Say Gay” law) and the kind of bathroom ban that used to get states into trouble but now proliferate.
If the ballot board approves the initiative, Equal Rights Ohio will be able start collecting the 415,000 signatures required to get on the ballot in 2026. If not, they’ll have to rewrite it, but the fight will continue on. To better understand what’s in the amendment and the organization’s approach to passing it, I spoke with Lis Regula, an organizer with Equal Rights Ohio about the mission and the strategy.
Progress Report: Where did the idea for an amendment come from?
A little bit over a year ago, Michaela Laubacher and Liz Schmidt and some other folks up in the northeast corner of the state started talking about what can we do to protect ourselves? This is a trans-led organization and trans-led initiative, and there have been just a couple small things at the Ohio legislature and other states that have made it more challenging to be in this space. We landed on an equal rights amendment.
And an amendment makes sense because obviously the legislature isn’t going to be helpful here.
We were more hopeful about the legislature last year when Citizens Not Politicians [a fair redistricting ballot amendment] was still working its way through the process. The reality of Ohio is that we are a purple state that has been gerrymandered into a very non-representative [Republican] supermajority in the House and Senate as well as governor and the executive branch and the judiciary.
I really appreciate some of the legislators who are there and still trying to do good work, like Rep. Nikkie Antonio with her Ohio Fairness Act, and Rep. Somani with trying to make [same sex] marriage legal through that route, but they’re in a really tough spot because of the maps in Ohio.
Citizens Not Politicians lost last year, essentially because it was given deeply misleading language by the Secretary of State, so people thought it would allow for gerrymandering instead of banning it. Are you worried about the state trying to do something like that to this amendment?
There's always fear of lots of things with an issue this big. Citizens Not Politicians did an incredible job and it sucks that they faced so much misinformation. From our perspective, because we know that the trans community is such a small portion of Ohio, we need to be able to build coalitions. And that was one of the things that led us to write language as inclusive as we did.
There are a lot of different kinds of people and characteristics covered under this amendment. That’s obviously a good thing, but it was also a strategic choice, right?
That was something we heard from advocates in Nevada who worked on their ERA, because demographically, there are a lot of similarities between the two states. It was also one of the things that kept coming up with people here: we have to be able to speak to rural Ohio as well as urban Ohio.
And when you're talking about rural Ohio, there is a lot of military presence there, either active duty, reserve, or veteran. There is also a lot of addiction in rural Ohio, unfortunately. So we made sure that we protected recovery and addiction status and we made sure that we included military status. We also included disability, which is fairly common in a lot of rural parts of the state. So we were just trying to do what we could to make sure that everybody sees themselves reflected in some way.
So let’s say this does pass. What kind of immediate effect could it have? Are there certain laws you’re hoping to neutralize? Rights you want to restore? I imagine it’s more about then challenging laws.
As much as I would love to see this be a simple magic wand so that once this passes, all the bad laws are gone, that’s not the reality of the situation. Having that Equal Rights Amendment, assuming it does pass, gives people the ability to exercise those rights that they now have articulated. As a good example, Ohio still has six HIV criminalization laws. If this passes, those do not go away. Instead, someone who is harmed by one of those laws can now sue to have that law removed.
The really nice thing, and I think the thing that people kind of gloss over, is that having the Equal Rights Amendment language in our state constitution means that the average Ohioan can, if they feel they are discriminated against, come to our state Supreme Court, which is less expensive and more easily obtainable than having to go all the way to the Supreme Court of the US. So it makes justice more within reach for the average person.
So what kind of laws, along with the same sex marriage ban and the HIV criminalization laws, do you anticipate being challenged early on?
Other things that I could easily see coming up because of this include some of the bills that we've seen against the LGBTQ community — ones that have passed or the ones that might pass in the future. That is something that I think we can't stress enough. If this language goes in, if we pass this amendment, then it is harder to pass new bad legislation.
There was an effort by activists to get a repeal of Ohio’s terrible new higher education law on the ballot this November, but they fell short of the signature requirement. I know they had a shorter period of time, but it’s still not easy to qualify an amendment in Ohio. What, if anything, do you take from that?
I was sad to see them not get enough signatures. They were also doing astonishing amounts of work on a very short timeline. We are giving ourselves more time than they had, in part to make sure that we don't have that same problem. We've already gone through and broken down the numbers on what is our path to victory; besides having to have over 415,000 signatures, there’s a requirement that we have to get at least 5% of the signatures in 44 counties, and so there's a little bit more restriction. We can't just get every signature from every registered voter in Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.
Which is designed to disproportionately hurt progressive initiatives.
I'm a country boy at heart. We've already been talking to folks in Darke County, where with the Medicaid cuts, they're likely going to be losing a hospital. So doing outreach in those rural spaces and being like, “Okay, this sucks. Here's what we can do together as a community.” This is what community organizing looks like in this space. How do you take care of each other? Let's have that conversation.
Thinking about Ohio specifically, with so many colleges and universities, it seems like they would be good places to target for signatures?
Colleges are an interesting place because in a lot of those college spaces, people are registered to vote somewhere. So while those can be really good, they can also be sinks for effort. We have already mapped out how many signatures we're aiming for from each of the counties and in some of the larger university spaces, like OSU and Kent State, where a lot of the folks are in-state students, yeah, we're going to be active on those campuses.
With the smaller colleges like Denison University, while the colleges themselves may not be great places to get tons of signatures, just because people come in from out of state, the towns and cities that they're a part of are often really good places. The city of Kent is a spectacular space for great gathering signatures for something like this.
Ohioans have largely voted for progressive ballot measures over the years, including the one that revived abortion rights in the state. Are you worried about the politics of this one or do you anticipate a similar result?
I am very optimistic that people will step up, especially as they engage with the language of the initiative. We've tried to make it as simple and straightforward while also legally enforceable as possible. I think that they'll step up as they get to know Ohio Equal Rights, get to have these conversations, and realize that we're not just doing this to help ourselves.
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If enough states pass ERA amendments into their constitutions, a nationwide ERA amendment could finally get passed!