Ohio Tragedies
The threats of fascism and white supremacy are global. But the individual tragedies are local.
Two stories from Ohio this week:
A 25-year-old Black man was shot at by the police 90 times, struck more than 60 times, then handcuffed after he died.
A 10-year-old girl was denied an abortion after being raped and impregnated because she was three days beyond the state’s new 6-week abortion limit.
“Handcuffed after he was shot and killed”
Bodycam footage of the killing of Jayland Walker is set to be released Sunday July 3, but the details as reported in Buzzfeed News, bear striking similarities to past police killings:
Police fired more than 90 rounds at Walker during the encounter, striking him more than 60 times, including in his face, Bobby DiCello, the family's attorney, told BuzzFeed News…
“We know that he was handcuffed after he was shot and killed, and he was found with his hands cuffed on his back when the medical personnel arrived,” DiCello added….
“I have never seen the kind of grief and the kind of pain that I'm seeing today,” he said, adding that Walker's mom, Pamela, is especially devastated by the details of the shooting. “The notion that 90 bullets were fired at her boy is something she just cannot understand.”
Ohio is the “open-carry” state where police previously shot dead 12-year-old Black boy Tamir Rice for the crime of holding a toy pistol. The Trump Justice Dept. closed that case in December 2020, declining to press federal charges.
Ohio is also the “open-carry” state where 22-year-old Black man John Crawford III was shot dead in a Walmart while on the phone with the mother of his children after another shopper lied to the police. Crawford’s only crime was taking a pellet gun off the store shelf. An opinion column in the Denver Post in 2014, said that “the Crawford case showed, “it’s open carry for whites and open season on Blacks.” The officer who shot Crawford was “cleared of wrongdoing by a grand jury, his own department and federal investigators” and said in a later deposition, “I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
Eight years after Crawford’s death, the police killing of Jayland Walker indicates that the authorities in Ohio haven’t changed a thing, either.
When getting raped at 10 is just the start of the nightmare
Ohio’s new 6-week abortion ban, with no exception for rape and incest, means that by the time most girls and women in the state find out they are pregnant, they will be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.
This week, a 10-year-old rape victim was denied an abortion in Ohio but was able to be taken to Indiana for an abortion in her seventh week of pregnancy. But that escape route could soon be closed, too. The Indiana GOP is planning to further restrict or ban abortions in that state later this month.
As activist Lindy Li tweeted: “Under GOP rule, RAPISTS GET TO CHOOSE THE MOTHER OF THEIR KIDS…” (Read my September 2021 interview with Lindy Li here.)
The potential for young children who are rape and incest victims to be denied abortions is a feature, not a bug of Ohio’s draconian new law.
In 2019, lawmakers told CBS News that the case of an 11-year-old raped multiple times and impregnated by a 26-year-old did not concern them. As CBS reported at the time:
More than 4,000 women were raped in Ohio in 2017, according to data compiled by the FBI. Of those, more than 800 victims were assaulted by a family member.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said, “sometimes, the evolution of the law requires bold steps.” When signing the bill, GOP Governor Mile DeWine said the fetus came first because: “The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us.”
This week, the religious extremists, sex offenders and conspiracy theorists on the Supreme Court continued their all-out assault on the rights of Americans and the future of human life on the planet.
Next in their sights: a case that will give Dark MAGA Big Lie-believers the chance to pick the winners of future elections.
This week, it’s more clear than ever that the threat posed by the forces of fascism and white supremacy are global. And the Supreme Court’s attack on every aspect of American life—now including the air we breathe—feels like a tsunami. But the tragedies are local.
Republicans in Ohio—and across the country—are failing minorities and creating new nightmares for children while parroting the lies that they’re not the racist ones, they’re the ones “protecting the most vulnerable among us.”
Meanwhile, Black lives are being extinguished. School children are being massacred in their classrooms. Girls and women—including victims of rape and incest—are being turned into incubators. And democracy is being eroded so fast that we are one election away from being able to vote our way out of it.
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It takes courage these days to post still more bad news.
I’m thinking of “Bonnie and Clyde.”