u/LKM_44122

Ohio Republicans just let a bill to end child marriage die.

No vote. No public explanation. Bipartisan support, a survivor's testimony, and not a single person testified against ending child marriage, and Republican senators still pulled it from the agenda behind closed doors. The Senate President, Vivek Ramaswamy's running mate Rob McColley, said back in February they would "probably pass it." Then it quietly disappeared in the Republican-controlled Senate he runs.

Senate Bill 341 would have done one core thing: end the loophole that lets 17-year-olds marry in Ohio with a court sign-off, a short waiting period, and a spouse up to four years older. It would have set a hard floor at 18 and made Ohio the 17th state to do it.

The reason this matters is written in Ohio's own record. Before the law was last touched in 2019, girls could marry at 16, and younger with court approval. Survivor Stephanie Lowry lived it. "In 2001, a month after my 16th birthday and 16 weeks pregnant, I was forced to marry a 19-year-old man here in Ohio." She came to the Statehouse to tell lawmakers why this has to end. They pulled the bill anyway. Between 2000 and 2024, more than 5,000 underage girls were married in this state.

Here's what the loophole does to a kid. When a minor marries in Ohio, they're legally emancipated from their parents and made financially dependent on their spouse. A married minor can't enter a domestic violence shelter, can't sign a lease, can't hire an attorney, and can't file for divorce. Between 70 and 80 percent of these marriages end in divorce, and minors trapped in them face sharply higher risks of abuse and trafficking.

A bill to stop children from being married off shouldn't be controversial. It had a Republican sponsor, Bill Blessing, who said it himself: "For God's sakes, why wouldn't we do this?" The party that runs the Senate let it die anyway.

A bill like this doesn't die by accident. Somebody has to choose to let it.

Unchained at Last is holding a protest at the Ohio Statehouse on June 3rd. If you think a 16-year-old shouldn't be married off to an adult, that's where to be.

Credit to All Things Ohio FB page for the meme.

https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/sb341

https://ohiosenate.gov/members/william-p-demora/news/demora-provides-sponsor-testimony-on-child-marriage-ban

The fight isn't against technology. It's against projects that drain a community's water and power, spike everyone's utility bills, and leave a handful of permanent jobs behind, all to pad a tech billionaire's margins. If a project can't be done without sticking the neighborhood with the costs, it shouldn't be done here. Cleveland shouldn't be sold out to be somebody else's server farm. The organizers are also pushing a statewide effort on data center rules. Whatever you think of a full ban, the basic ask is sound: communities should get a say, and projects shouldn't get to dump their costs on the neighborhood.

Liberty Valley Church in Northfield, Oh

There will be people collecting signatures for the ballot initiative on site.

https://www.13abc.com/2026/05/08/ohioans-push-put-data-center-limits-ballot/

Perry Village officials signed an NDA with this company who has never built a data center without public comment. 65% of people don't want data centers in their own back yard.

AI is here to stay, but the rollout happening at this pace is unsustainable!

There's a community meeting May 23rd at 4PM at Community of Faith Assembly (5949 Engel Ave) about the giant data center somebody's trying to drop on Slavic Village. The thing would pull 150 megawatts - enough juice to run 100,000 homes - which means your power bill is about to get interesting, and the heat coming off these places is wild (Utah's proposed one would dump the thermal equivalent of 23 atom bombs a day into its valley). Even with the fancy "closed-loop" cooling they're pitching, hyperscale data centers chug millions of gallons of water, and they're talking about tapping the sewer district's stormwater tunnel. And the kicker - these things create maybe a few dozen permanent jobs while hosting the AI that's already wiping out entry-level white collar work across the country. Show up on the 23rd.

AI has real benevolent uses - climate modeling, green building design, cancer research, drug discovery. None of that is what's being built at hyperscale right now. The current AI build-out isn't optimizing for any of that. It's optimizing for surveillance, market dominance, and the displacement of workers, paid for with our water, our power grid, and our privacy. Unchecked growth at this scale isn't for the benefit of humanity. It's for the benefit of whoever controls the tech.

He fired all the CDC ship inspectors, the ones that were paid by the cruise companies, and now we don't have anyone to check our ships for health hazards with the threat of Hantavirus and other diseases.

This is the former heroin addict. The guy who admitted to having had a worm in his brain. The guy who admitted to snorting coke off of a toilet seat. The guy that brought home a whale head mounted on his car. And now something about cutting off the penis from raccoon roadkill on the side of the road?

Yeah, that's the guy that heads our health system now. Are we winning yet?