An Article by:

Steve Hammons

Originally published in the AmericanChronicle.com

http://americanchronicle.com/articles/53747

The recent controversial remarks from Cincinnati radio personality Bill Cunningham about Barack Obama at a McCain rally can be instructive about the Cincinnati region and Ohio.

I was born and raised in the Cincinnati area, was given the mandatory Ohio history classes in school and later went to college in southern Ohio at nearby Ohio University in Athens, a couple of hours east of Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati and southern Ohio region has a unique history that may be relevant in the run-up to the Democratic primary and the 2008 elections. This history and current flavor of the whole state might also be of interest.

We know that Ohio has been in the news during recent elections. Concerns about questionable election processes in Ohio have been part of this.

After Cunningham made his comments at the McCain rally, another Ohio politician followed him to address the crowd … former Congressman Rob Portman who represented the Cincinnati area.

Portman has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential running mate with McCain, and a possible presidential candidate in 2012.

SPECIAL ELECTION

Portman left his congressional seat in 2005 to take a position in the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, which carries the rank of ambassador.

From 2006 to 2007, he took another position in the Bush administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He currently is working at a law firm in Cincinnati.

What is interesting is that when a special election was held for Portman’s congressional seat in 2005, the solidly Republican-voting area almost elected another attorney and Marine Corps Reserve major who had served in Iraq, and was running as a centrist Democrat.

That person was Paul Hackett, and during the campaign he said that he had opposed the Iraq war, yet felt it was his duty to volunteer to serve there.

In the congressional race in August 2005, Hackett, who notably opposed gun control, gained attention by referring to George W. Bush as a “chicken hawk” for avoiding combat service in Vietnam during that war.

Hackett also said Bush made “stupid” remarks such as “bring it on,” challenging insurgents in Iraq to attack U.S. troops there.

Hackett reportedly bluntly stated about Bush, “I’ve said I don’t like the S.O.B.”

Hackett’s opponent, Jean Schmidt, strongly supported Bush and the Iraq war.

Hackett lost by about 3,500 votes, getting about 48 percent of the vote in a district that routinely elected the previous Republican congressman there by about 70 percent.

This was a very surprising development in southwestern Ohio.

Obama’s stance on the invasion and occupation of Iraq may resonate in Ohio, where many active duty and reserve Army and National Guard personnel have been killed and wounded. Active duty Marines and Marine reservists from Ohio have also been killed and injured in high numbers in Iraq.

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

The hilly country of southwestern Ohio around Cincinnati is very much like southern Indiana next door and northern Kentucky, just south across the Ohio River.

If you go further east, the southern neighbor becomes West Virginia and southeastern Ohio is considered part of the Appalachian region, as the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains start there. There is coal mining in this region.

Many people in southern Ohio speak with a slightly or markedly southern-type accent.

An ancient glacier that flattened central and northern Ohio stopped just short of the still-hilly southern part of the state.

In that flat central Ohio area, there are plenty of farms, small and medium-size towns with the state capitol of Columbus right in the middle.

Northern Ohio has a lot of the industrial areas around Lake Erie that have had historical links with Detroit and other centers of the old “rust belt” regions.

Many people here speak with a somewhat northern type of accent.

There are many good union people in Ohio. Sometimes their social and political views are centrist and they might find positions and candidates of either major party to be valid.

Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions and have a middle class or even upper middle class economic status are educated enough to know that the struggles of the union and labor movements over the decades resulted in the benefits they have now.

Some realize that the social, economic and political forces in America that supported or opposed working people and the unions were associated in certain patterns with the two major political parties. Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions may not fully understand this history.

Obama’s efforts and results in Ohio will be related to many of these these factors.

OHIO HISTORY AND ETHNICITY

Will Obama’s mixed-ethnicity be a factor? Probably. There are not too many Ohioans who had a father from Kenya, Africa.

Although Ohio is not as diverse as Hawaii, where Obama mostly grew up, raised by his grandparents from Kansas, there is some interesting ethnic and historical background.

Today, you can find people of virtually every ethnic background living in Ohio.

Italian-Americans in northern Ohio, German-Americans in southwestern Ohio, you name it. People from Eastern Europe often came to work in Ohio’s steel mills and mines.

In the early 1800s, Germans were a dominant ethnicity that settled early Cincinnati.

There reportedly were German or even Nazi sympathizers there before and during U.S. entry into World War II.

At the same time, some local German-Americans, including some distant relatives of mine, thought about changing their very German names to avoid problems during the war years, such as being thought of as “the enemy.”

It could be that some German-Americans in Cincinnati then went overboard the other way, feeling that being a “super American patriot” required certain political and social positions.

Going further back in history, during slavery, for a period of time, laws provided that escaping slaves who crossed north of the Ohio River into southern Ohio could not be returned to slave owners and were, as a practical matter, free.

Subsequent laws required escaping slaves to reach Canada to be free from slave catchers.

Amish and Quakers are found throughout areas of Ohio. The Underground Railroad was very active in southern Ohio during the slavery era. Some Quaker relatives of mine, according to stories and rumors, were involved in the Underground Railroad in the rural areas of southwestern Ohio.

There is a problematic element here. Next door in southern and central Indiana, the KKK is quite strong and active. This is also an aspect of the region in general.

My grandfather told a story about a relative of ours who, decades earlier, had run for sheriff in Kentucky. One night the KKK came to visit him, white robes and all. They told him if he was not on board with the KKK, he would not get elected.

He apparently told them he was not on their side … and he did not get elected sheriff.

Many people entering southern Ohio in the 1800s and 1900s were migrating from the Appalachian Mountain regions in Kentucky, such as some relatives of mine, and from elsewhere in the Appalachian region.

In more recent decades, many Appalachians chose to escape the poverty, oppression and violence of the coal-mining regions. Cincinnati was a center for these escapees too.

Among these migrating groups were people who were mixed-ethnicity European and Native American Indians such as the Cherokee whose native lands were in the Appalachian region.

Many early explorers in the 1700s had intermarried with the Cherokee and generations of mixed English-Scottish and Cherokee families lived in the region.

In the years before the 1839 “Trail of Tears” forced march west, and the confiscation of Cherokee lands and homes, many mixed-ethnicity families blended into the mainstream society, with only a few family stories or suspicions remaining about the Indian connections in the family tree, such as my own family.

Another interesting aspect of Ohio is that after the American Revolution, many Revolutionary War veterans and their families moved over the mountains to settle in eastern Ohio. Today, in the cemeteries of southeastern Ohio, you can find the gravestones of many who fought in the American Revolution.

Ohio University, where I went to college, was founded by Revolutionary War veterans.

I am happy to say that I had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War and were associates and relatives of George Washington and the other American leaders of that period.

I also recently learned that, according to a genealogy researcher in the family, Obama and I are distantly related too.

How do all of these and many other cultural, ethnic, geographic and historical elements fit together in our current political landscape as we approach the Democratic primary and then the general election?

We will soon be finding out.

Obama will probably have significant support in Ohio from a wide variety of people.

I bet that many Ohioans will be thinking long and hard about Obama, about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, about the direction our country has been going in for the last few years and about themselves and their core beliefs, deep down inside.

Tags: democracy, ohio, politics, race, race relations, society, sociology, Steve Hammons
Categories: Commentary, Society, Democracy, Politics, Sociology, Steve Hammons
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An Article by:

Susan Hutson

Ohio – a state consisting of 21 electoral votes – declares a law that essentially negates the Constitutional Right guaranteeing Due Process.

On September 1, 2006, Ohio’s Attorney General, Jim Petro, and others, including Senator Mike DeWine and other House Representatives, advocated the adoption of an Ohio law, which allows for a person to be classified as a sex offender, and, subsequently, be subjected to government monitoring as well as public humiliation – and, indeed, the possible object of retaliation by vigilantes - via the person’s picture and a name on a Website; all of which can occur without the individual ever being convicted of a crime.

This law has been coined The World’s Worst Idea Ever. People – never convicted of a sex offense – can still end up on a publicly available sex-offender registry provided for by various state agencies belonging to the State of Ohio. The law is, apparently, designed in order to provide for the publication of sex-offenders’ identities, even if the statute of limitations - amended to the criminal statutes – has transpired. It is peculiar that the State Legislature of Ohio would put forth such an initiative, which cuts at the core of Constitutional Liberties, when all that was needed was a modification to the current statutes on the books – prohibiting sexual abuses – that protracts the statute of limitations qualifying these types of criminal offenses and the terms under which they can be prosecuted.

Most alarmingly, apparently, the only indication that someone has committed a sexual offense, allowing for a person to be legally deemed as a sex-offender is an acknowledgement or judgment of punitive or compensatory responsibilities transpiring in a civil action against the party that will, subsequently, be legally defined as a sex-offender.

Editor’s Notes: The aforementioned legislation appears to have been motivated by a deal struck between the State of Ohio and the Catholic Church, where the Church can maintain its one strike and your safe but two strikes and you are out policy while, contemporaneously, providing for some safeguards against future sexual abuses – a provision compelled upon the Church by the State of Ohio – by virtue of the liturgical civil defendants’ classifications as a sex-offenders.

I think it is absurd to pass such legislation when all that needs to be done with respect to this matter is allowing for the extension of the statute of limitations in these types of crimes.

The protraction of time allowed for prosecuting sex-offenders is clearly more sensible than allowing a potentially vindictive individual – acting from motivations of mere spite; emotions not resulting from sexual victimhood – essentially ruin an individual’s reputation and livelihood through recourse to a Constitutional subterfuge, consisting of a civil adjudication – which involve the lofty presumption of innocence; nor, the burden placed upon the plaintiffs, requiring them to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

For purposes of a hypothetical, consider the following: An embittered member of a former romantic relationship pursues – through the unconstitutional legislation described above – revenge in such a profound form that it essentially strips away every life opportunity to which the afflicted individual would normally have had access, if not for an imposed, publicly declared label of a sex-offender.

The upset ex-lover could cause the other to be forbidden from seeing their children (without a liaison); the vindictive party could cause the other to lose their job; he or she could cause the subject of the accusations to be compelled to move, if living within 1,000 ft. of a school (by way the crow flies); and the individual, operating out of vengeful motivations, could inflict insufferable emotional trauma.

In addition, this law would allow an actually convicted offender, or predator, to strike a deal with the prosecution, where he or she falsely attributes guilt to another individual, causing that individual to be bestowed with a prodigious burden, necessitating the practice indefinite practice of stigma management, resulting from his or her affliction with the labeled of a sex-offender.

Do Ohioans need to have a legal document signed by everyone they know that contains a “Hold Harmless” clause, stating that the individuals with whom they have intimate relations are not being forced into sexual acts or being assaulted in a form that constitutes a sex-offence?

In order to protect one’s self from the potential retribution from a vindictive ex-lover seeking revenge through recourse to this Unconstitutional law, it, most likely, would be in everyone’s best interests in Ohio to take such safeguards.

Editor’s Notes: “Hell hast no furry like a woman’s scorn.”

Are the people who conceived of this law from this country, and do they understand America’s tradition of Due Process?

Have they considered that we are still supposed to have a Constitution? Is the legislature in the State of Ohio inept?

Should there be a major overhaul of the people who are running this state? Why has this new law been kept under the covers?

Shouldn’t everyone know they could be a target of harassment and are labeled with this?

Ohio is a very politically corrupt state, as you may well know. I once knew a woman living in Ohio, who had been set up by a disgruntled U.S. Postal Inspector, and was denied Due Process. Needless to say, nobody cared. The Inspector lied to police dispatch and said the woman was suicidal. The police went to the dark back door of the house and the Inspector met them there. When the woman came to the door, the police grabbed her and pulled her out. After the woman was put into the cruiser, the inspector entered the cruiser with the police congregating at another a distance away, and the inspector knocker her out. She was sent to jail without a mug shot and the next morning the Inspector with his business card showing he was an attorney, posed as her attorney, and told the judge to send her to a mental hospital. No Due Process! Nobody cared!

What would you do, if you fall victim to one of these constitutionally subversive provisions provided for in this legislation?

You do have an opportunity 6 years later to ask a judge to have your name removed from the list. Six years after potentially losing your children, job, financial standing, home, and respect of other members of your community, etc.

Please push for your state to protect the Right of Due Process and not allow such a horrible loss to the legal process, which once protected Americans! What is next?

Will a person be implanted with a biometric chip without their knowledge or approval?

Editor’s Notes: Will we begin to implant chips in former sex offenders, in order to guard against them committing future sexual assaults? What if the current policies in Ohio persist, allowing for people to be legally defined – without any protection or recourse provided by Due Process – as sex-offenders? A person only the subject of civil accusations might suffer the same fate as a criminally convicted person - (and I certainly do not endorse implanting a chip transmitting a serialized identification, for the purposes of tracking and surveillance, into anyone).

More ominously, programs are already being introduced to implant these tracking devices into the flesh of infants; a proposal, which would ultimately lead to surveillance by agencies operating in the sphere of law enforcement, that is being promoted under the pretense of providing a means to identify the locations of missing children. The reason I have included these remarks, pertaining to biometric chips, is that they are all interrelated. The implementation of one of these affronts to our privacies and liberties can be used to enhance government or corporate surveillance of our activities in other scenarios; such is the case with the implanted bar code chips and the endless punitions endured by those who have been convicted as sex-offenders.

Furthermore, considering the blurred distinctions between criminality and civil responsibilities, currently taking form in Ohio, we all need to be concerned for our own personhood’s, whether we possess sexual aversions or not. For this reason, we need to challenge any infringement upon the rights we, as a people, have procured, because an assault upon any person’s liberties and rights in this society can have ramifications for all of us.

R Cole

Let’s get rid of the substandard politicians!

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, due process, government, legislation, liberty, microchips, Midwest, ohio, sex offender registry
Categories: Commentary, Midwest, liberty, constitution, bill of rights, government, Legislation, Ohio
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