Ohio Republican Frank LaRose to run for Senate to stop 'woke left' and reproductive rights

Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced Monday that he will seek his party’s nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024. He said his candidacy was about protecting his daughters from the “woke left” and touted his total opposition to reproductive rights.

“As the father of three young girls, I’m not willing to sit quietly while the woke left tries to cancel the American Dream,” NBC News reported that LaRose said in an announcement statement. “We have a duty to defend the values that made America the hope of the world.”

LaRose, who served for eight years in the Ohio Senate before being elected secretary of state in 2018, has a long record of opposing abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, climate protections, and democracy.

“As a Christian, Frank LaRose believes in the sanctity of human life, and he’s the only candidate in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race with a 100 percent pro-life voting record,” his website claims.

On the “Life & Health” page of the site, he vows to back federal laws to provide “reasonable protections for unborn life” and highlights his consistent opposition to reproductive rights:

While others talk about voting to protect unborn children, Frank has the record to prove it. Early in his service as a legislator, he voted to ban late-term abortions, promote abstinence education, protect pro-life student groups, and prevent taxpayer-funded abortions for public employees. In 2017, he supported a bill to criminalize a barbaric procedure on unborn babies known as dismemberment” or “D&E” abortions. National Right to Life called the legislation a “game-changer in the abortion debate.” In 2018, Frank voted to pass the Ohio Heartbeat Bill, a measure to prohibit abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat. He also voted to override Governor Kasich’s veto of the legislation.

The misleading term “fetal heartbeat” is used by anti-abortion activists to describe electrical activity in a fetus, detectable at about six week’s gestation, often before a person realizes they are pregnant.

After Ohio voters began an effort to amend the state’s Constitution to protect the right to choose an abortion, LaRose backed an effort to raise the vote threshold for constitutional amendments before an amendment on abortion would be voted on. After initially claiming that State Issue 1, an August 2023 referendum on requiring a 60% supermajority for all future constitutional amendments, was not about abortion, he said in June, “It’s 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution. The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.”

LaRose tweeted in May about efforts at LGBTQ+ inclusion, “In Seneca County tonight, the barn was packed with Ohioans who are sick of an administration that’s more focused on pronouns and other gender ideology nonsense than on American families’ concerns over inflation, gas prices, and the national debt.”

He also falsely claimed that backers of the abortion rights amendment secretly want kids to be able to have gender-affirming medical care without parental consent. In a June 21 radio interview with right-wing host Bob Frantz, first flagged by the progressive research group American Bridge 21st Century, LaRose said sexual health privacy protections are a Trojan horse:

And of course, what the left wants to do is allow children to go under the knife for these gender-reassignment surgeries without parental involvement. My school needs a permission slip to give my child an aspirin. But in theory, under this radical amendment that’s being proposed, a doctor could perform a sex-change procedure on one of my children without me even knowing it. It’s preposterous. It’s dangerous, is what it is. And it’s immoral.

LaRose has criticized Brown and President Joe Biden for backing clean energy investments and climate change infrastructure.

In March, he tweeted a link to an op-ed published on the Montana website Daily Inter Lake by Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, who decried what he called “the President’s attack on oil, coal and natural gas bring[ing] our nation to the brink of an all-out energy emergency.” LaRose added, “President Biden and his yes-man @SherrodBrown are killing our economic future and US energy independence with their ridiculous green crusade.”

LaRose’s campaign website says of Biden’s climate investments: “They rolled into 2022 with a hyper-partisan and grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, racking up billions of dollars in new debt and higher taxes on middle-class Ohio families to advance the radical policies of the Green New Deal. The Biden-Brown economy has been a bust.”

LaRose has voted for gerrymandered maps designed to give Republicans the lion’s share of seats in a closely divided swing state. Even after Ohio voters amended the state Constitution to prohibit redistricted maps that are primarily drawn to favor one party over another, LaRose repeatedly voted for illegally gerrymandered maps. Due in part to his actions as a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, Republicans hold 10 of Ohio’s 15 congressional seats in a state won by former President Donald Trump with just a 53% majority in 2020.

On Monday, LaRose appeared on a radio show hosted by right-wing figure Hugh Hewitt and called himself “the only one in the race that is 100% pro-life, 100% pro-Second Amendment.” He also vowed to make permanent the individual tax cuts passed in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Those tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans and making them permanent would add trillions of dollars to the national debt, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Corporate executive Bernie Moreno and state Sen. Matt Dolan are also running in the Republican primary.

In a press statement on Monday, Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Reeves Oyster said: “The Republican ‘slugfest’ for Ohio’s Senate seat is shaping up to be another long, contentious battle that will leave whoever emerges damaged in the eyes of Ohio voters. In the days ahead, the people of Ohio should ask themselves: what is Frank LaRose really doing for us?”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.