Ohio Republicans don't trust private, unobserved behavior
This is an increasingly common posture in America. So, what do we do?
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
H.L. Mencken
That’s an old line that one of my journalism professors at OU would quote often. He’s a longtime columnist who’s tangled plenty with the uptight Ohio Republican set. This is a core function of journalism: to hold those in power to account, to point out at a deeper level what their legislative activity means and who it serves. Why are they doing what they’re doing?
In Ohio, over the past year, a pattern has taken shape in those legislative decisions, or rather a pattern has not just taken shape but become obvious, a pattern in government that mirrors broader trends in America and one that concerns itself more with personal behavior than, say, public policy. You are not to be trusted as a tax-paying, voting adult. And if you ever were, that was a grave mistake that is now being corrected through legislation and culture and technology.
Take three recent bills in Ohio. First, pornography. Lawmakers pushed to require age verification tied to real identity, your government ID, third-party screening systems, the kind of thing that makes it clear it’s you on the other end of the screen. The effort ran into legal trouble and hasn’t fully held, but the intent was obvious: take something private and put it behind a checkpoint. It may even seem admirable on face value (keep kids more than one click away from inexplicable indecency, and all that), but the tech ramifications are the problem.
Your mileage may vary on what you think about porn, sure. The bottom line is that the state tried to remove anonymity from something that has historically been anonymous. You’re not to be trusted in your own home. Age verification from one thing turns into age verification for other things in short order, and then, before too long, they’ve got a file on you.
Then they came for THC products, the very same products that had been greenlit variously by the voters and by the federal government through its 2018 Farm Bill. Intoxicating hemp drinks and similar products that had found their way into bars, carryouts, and everyday retail were pulled back and restricted just last month.
Your mileage may vary on THC. The bottom line is that something easy and approved-of by the people became something to ban. You are not to be trusted with that 5mg sparkling lemonade.
Now it’s sports betting. After a full rollout that put it everywhere—on phones, on TVs, in every commercial break—there’s already a push to tighten it and limit access.
Your mileage may vary on sports betting. The bottom line is that something widely available is being reconsidered once people actually started using it.
(That said, I could do without the relentless ads during Guardians games.)
I understand that Ohio is a deeply conservative state and that a puritanical/traditional form of Christianity is on the rise among the voting Millennial and Gen Z sets, so there are all sorts of social forces painting writers like myself into a corner here. I don’t love sitting around defending stuff like porn and cannabis and sports betting; it makes the writer, me, sound like I’m gorging myself on the stuff all day. But part of this is a free speech issue; part of this is the will of the voters; part of this, on the other side of the coin, is simply the omnipresent American tendency to want to legislate morality. That last part is very fashionable these days.
Let’s tie some of these loose threads together, because I don’t want to conflate porn with sports betting. There are much clearer through-lines here.
The Center for Christian Virtue
As we all know, or should know, the Ohio Statehouse features a revolving door between its halls and the Center for Christian Virtue across the street. To be an Ohio Republican in Columbus is to be a steward of the Center for Christian Virtue, and we see power dynamics like this in every state, in every tier of politics, from your local city council on up to the White House. To be a federal legislator is by and large to be a steward of AIPAC lobbyists, for example.
What is the Center for Christian Virtue? It’s one of the most active religious lobbying groups in Ohio politics. It started in the anti-pornography scene and has since expanded into a full-spectrum policy shop, weighing in on everything from education to cannabis to gambling. They describe themselves as the state’s largest Christian policy organization, which is a phrase that tells you less about size and more about intent.
Not for nothing, Christian church attendance, Bible reading, even Christian student orgs at places like OSU are on the rise. These things are not unrelated. There’s been a noticeable shift, especially among those younger conservatives, toward a more defined, more intentional version of Christianity, one easily disseminated on social media and in various spheres of influence. This is not just a background identity, but rather something practiced, discussed, organized. You see it in in the way certain issues are framed less as policy debates and more as questions of order; this has been a clear and obvious signal since at least 2015 in America, though you could make the argument easily that it dictated everything that’s happened since Plymouth Rock.
This narrative arc matters because it produces a certain kind of politics.
It’s politics that doesn’t necessarily argue that something should be illegal. It argues that it shouldn’t even exist; it’s an argument about posture before the lord.
Porn becomes a problem when it’s anonymous. When no one knows it’s you. So the solution is to remove the anonymity. Put your name, your ID, your identity between you and the screen. The policy stops short of banning the behavior outright, but instead makes sure that its apparent unseemliness is attached to you.
The THC products are a more complicated story; I see in this ban an attempt to re-regulate a loose end that Republicans never fully figured out. They’re square, remember; they don’t know anything about cannabis. These hemp beverages, fully legal, are functionally the same as the state-regulated cannabis products on dispensary shelves—the ones taxed at exorbitant rates and subject to rigorous and expensive lab testing. Policymakers across the U.S. are trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one, and the result is a ban on a voter-approved market. It’s Republicans refusing to admit they didn’t know what they were doing with earlier legislation, too busy kowtowing at the CCV, so they package their ignorance into an extremely clunky bill.
So, no THC bevvies for you.
Sports betting is now a problem, apparently, when it’s constant and easily accessible by voters who approved it (rather than shunted off to dimly lit former department stores in urban centers). Now the instinct is to rein it in, to make it less seamless, less ever-present. We can’t have that.
The message is that you should not be able to do these things easily, privately, without some form of oversight.
Mass surveillance
I chose the headline this week carefully.
Step back from the individual bills, from the personalities, from the Center for Christian Virtue. Look at the environment these laws are landing in. We now live in a culture where everything can be recorded, and more importantly, is expected to be. Every conversation, every mistake, every offhand comment can and will be captured, clipped, shared, remixed again, and sent back out over and over. (Then reshaped again.) Nothing disappears.
You don’t have to look far for examples. Afroman has built an entire second act off footage taken inside his own home, turned into content, turned into a product, turned into a loop that never quite ends. That’s a model for the double-edged sword at play.
So, people adjust.
Gen Z men, especially, have grown up inside that environment. Every interaction carries the possibility of being recorded or misunderstood or dragged somewhere it wasn’t meant to go. The cost of being slightly goofy or awkward is higher than it used to be, or at least it feels that way.
People pull back, exercise caution. They date less, according to emerging research. They say less. They show up less. They learn to manage themselves in advance, to avoid the moment entirely rather than risk it. You would expect some of that energy to move into the usual outlets. Porn, cannabis, betting. The classics. Private, low-stakes, no audience.
And some of it does, but a lot of it goes elsewhere, like into video games, where interaction is structured and predictable. Into AI, where responses are controlled. Into podcasts and forums that offer a clearer set of rules about how the world works, even when those rules are narrow or distorted. In some cases, into spaces that reward anger and isolation rather than participation.
That’s not a Statehouse issue on its own, but it’s not unrelated either. This isn’t a Christian issue, per se, but it’s not unrelated. (Not for nothing, young Gen Z white men, primarily those without college degrees, voted for Trump in 2024 to the tune of 67 percent.)
At the same time that people are already pulling back from public life, already adjusting their behavior under the assumption that they’re being watched, the policy response is to extend that logic further into what used to be private. Add verification. Add structure. Add a system.
The message converges from both directions: Be careful what you say, be careful what you do, and don’t assume you can do it without someone, somewhere, knowing.
It’s easy to read the laws in isolation and see them as targeted fixes. A response to a specific concern. Protect this, regulate that. “Porn bad,” “cannabis bad,” “sports betting bad.” We love to reduce things to simple arguments. Just read any Facebook post even nominally touching on political questions.
Taken together, however, and placed inside the culture, those policy decisions in Ohio point in the same direction, toward a world where fewer and fewer decisions happen without a bureaucratic layer between you and the act.
What starts as morality legislation culminates in generational behavioral shifts. Conditioned responses. Now, you don’t simply follow the rules like a good citizen, in the old way; now, you start to anticipate the rules, you start to edit yourself before anything even happens.
Once that becomes the default, you don’t need constant enforcement of things like porn or cannabis or sports betting or liking the wrong post or saying the wrong thing or making a joke that doesn’t land or spending too much time on creative hobbies or or staring at the fridge with the door open or saying “lol” when you didn’t laugh or any other small, forgettable decision that used to pass without comment.
People will adjust on their own.
It might seem like I’m taking us far afield from the Statehouse, but I think this is all of a piece. We’re an increasingly atomized society, and we’re not to be trusted; we’re not even meant to trust ourselves. Hand off the big decisions on things like will, agency, language, consumption, etc., hand them off to God and to the Statehouse. Then you can sit back and read the Bible, safe and sound and knowing that no one else, not your neighbors, not your coworkers, not your family, not your friends, no one else is sneaking off to do weird things in the privacy of their own homes.
***
In other news…
The newsletter is tough, because inevitably you’re going to make a transition that feels awfully touchy. I added the asterisks to soften the blow; little design touches like that will keep coming as I figure out what I’m doing in this thing each week.
I was going to remark on how even today’s New York Times front page features everything from Iran news to, e.g., hockey rink stories, and then I noticed that the NYT itself is running a feature on how Republican legislatures are cracking down on voter initiatives. Go figure!
On with the week’s news.
RIP Lee McClelland
It’s always jarring to learn that someone from your distant past has died, even more so when you missed the obituary and found out weeks later—after calling hours and any services have come and gone. Such is the case with the passing of Lee McClelland, a Cleveland musician and my guitar teacher from 1999 through 2006.
Lee taught at Westgate Music, another small business long departed from the west side suburbs of Cleveland. The place was a tiny warren of tinier studios. A small retail section anchored the front (I often sifted through the variety of guitar picks up front before my lesson), and from there the hallway led to doors for each teacher’s little domain. I mean it: Even getting the guitar case into the room for your lesson was an exercise in complex geometry. Once I was settled, Lee presided over a fantastic world where he taught me how to play the guitar.
He used staff paper, which has five lines, to write guitar tablature, which needs six. So, with the tiniest pencil nubs possible, he would scrawl that sixth line below the staff. He must have done that thousands of times in his life. Tiny pencil nub, sixth line, onto the lesson.
Our first lesson, he started with “Tequila” by The Champs, evoking in me memories of The Sandlot. Over the years, he encouraged me to bring in songs I wanted to learn, too, from time to time. I recall bringing in 311’s self-titled album and playing “Down.” What an insane thing to do. The opening riff, awash in distortion, power chords for days, blared out of the stereo, and Lee fought through what must have been a real what-the-hell moment to say, sure, yeah, we can figure this out. We did, by which I mean he did, painfully listening through this song and determining what Tim Mahoney was playing.
But what else was I going to do? I wanted to learn the guitar, yes, but I wanted to learn the guitar in the style of Mahoney or Tom Morello or Daron Malakian. Those were the guys I was obsessively listening to back then. My guitar case was slathered in System of a Down stickers, Deftones stickers, 311, Rage, Tool, all sorts of other weirdo stickers without rhyme or reason. Thankfully, Lee didn’t let me take up all of our time with that stuff; he taught me “The Rain Song,” “Black Magic Woman,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and he’d explain what was actually happening in those songs, what the structures were actually doing to make the piece a whole. He taught me how to read sheet music for the guitar (no sixth line needed, though I’ve long forgotten the language). He taught me, or tried to teach me, the value of consistent practice, which lesson I routinely tossed off by not practicing. That in itself is a lesson, too; you show up without having practiced enough times, made to seem a fool when you don’t know what you’re doing, then you will practice moving forward. Applies to all things in life.
I stopped taking lessons as I got into college. I stopped doing a lot of things I did in high school when I got to college, which is part of a suite of regrets I carry, but I haven’t stopped playing guitar. It’s been more than 25 years since I first walked into Lee’s studio to learn “Tequila,” the better part of my life, and the guitar has informed my character more than most other material things. I just bought another one last summer, a Taylor GS Mini Koa, a beautiful instrument in a compact size, almost a parlor guitar but with a rich and bright tone; now that I think about it, I’d have an easier time carting that guitar into Lee’s studio than the Strat I played back then.
So, rest in peace, Lee.