Any serious look at the state of national politics will reveal the Republican Party’s platform to be almost exclusively representative of the most fringe of American society — in many ways, completely divorced from reality.
At home in Hamilton County, we like to think the chaos of Washington, D.C., is foreign to us, with no discernible effect in our own backyard. The Republican in the statehouse, on the County Commission or on the school board isn’t some out-of-touch bureaucrat, but a neighbor — or so we like to believe.
Unfortunately for us, the local Republican Party is as thoroughly MAGA-fied as the national party. Fueled by the animus of Christian nationalists irrationally devoted to excluding social groups deemed unworthy of full participation in society, the county GOP is now a cheerleader of the most senseless antisocial politics imaginable.
Instead of considering evidence-informed ways to bolster public education, the local party is fixated on the minutiae of school curricula and purging anything related to LGBTQ+ people from schools, claiming this harmless set of identities as an inherent danger to children, all based on nothing more than paranoid delusion.
At the forefront of the debate last year over Hamilton County Schools continuing its decade-long contract with Centerstone, a mental health services company that provides supplementary care to students at no cost to the district, was Centerstone’s support of LGBTQ+ students.