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      Providence Officials Approve Overdose Prevention Center

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      The facility, also known as a safe injection center, will be the first in Rhode Island and the only one in the U.S. outside New York City to operate openly.More than two years ago, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to authorize overdose prevention centers, facilities where people would be allowed to use illicit drugs under professional supervision. On Thursday, the Providence City Council approved the establishment of what will be the state’s first so-called safe injection site.Minnesota is the only other state to approve these sites, also known as supervised injection centers and harm reduction centers, but no facility has yet opened there. While several states and cities across the country have taken steps toward approving these centers, the concept has faced resistance even in more liberal-leaning states, where officials have wrestled with the legal and moral implications. The only two sites operating openly in the country are in New York City, where Bill de Blasio, who was then mayor, announced the opening of the first center in 2021.The centers employ medical and social workers who guard against overdoses by supplying oxygen and naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug, as well as by distributing clean needles, hygiene products and tests for viruses.Supporters say these centers prevent deaths and connect people with resources. Brandon Marshall, a professor and the chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, said studies from other countries “show that overdose prevention centers save lives, increase access to treatment, and reduce public drug use and crime in the communities in which they’re located.”Opponents of the centers, including law enforcement groups, say that the sites encourage a culture of permissiveness around illegal drugs, fail to require users to seek treatment and bring drug use into neighborhoods that are already struggling with high overdose rates.Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, said that while supervised drug consumption sites “reduce risks while people use drugs inside them,” they reach only a few people and “don’t alter the severity or character of a neighborhood’s drug problem.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Utah Sets Restrictions on Transgender People’s Bathroom Use

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      The NewsUtah will prohibit transgender people from using bathrooms in public schools and government-owned buildings that align with their gender identity, after Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill on Tuesday imposing the restrictions.Demonstrators protest the bill on the steps of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Marielle Scott/The Deseret News, via Associated PressBackgroundThe bill, House Bill 257, which passed the Legislature last week, set sweeping restrictions for transgender people.Under the bill, also known as Sex-Based Designations for Privacy, Anti-Bullying and Women’s Opportunities, transgender people can use bathrooms that match their gender identity only if they can prove that they have had gender-affirming surgery and have had the sex on their birth certificates changed.In public schools, students can now use only a bathroom, shower room or locker room that aligns with their sex assigned at birth, with few exceptions. For government-owned buildings, including state universities, the restrictions apply only to showers and locker rooms.Violators may face charges for loitering, and government-owned institutions may face fines if they do not enforce the new rules. The state auditor will be required to establish a process to receive and investigate reports of violations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      How Nikki Haley’s Lean Years Led Her Into an Ethical Thicket

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      From her earliest days in South Carolina politics, Ms. Haley’s public service paid personal financial dividends.Nikki Haley had been serving in the South Carolina legislature for less than two years when she applied for a job in late 2006 as an accounting clerk at Wilbur Smith Associates, an engineering and design firm with state contracts.She needed work. Her parents’ clothing business, where she and her husband, Michael Haley, had both worked, was winding down. Ms. Haley was earning a salary of just $22,000 as a part-time state legislator. And her husband’s own enterprise, involving businesses swapping goods and services, was losing money.Wilbur Smith executives regarded Ms. Haley as overqualified for the accounting job. But because of her wide-ranging network, they would later say, they put Ms. Haley on a retainer, asking her to scout out potential new business. She never found any, a top executive later said. Over the next two years, the firm paid her $48,000 for a job the executive described as “a passive position.”That contract, and a subsequent, much more lucrative one as a fund-raiser for a prominent hospital in her home county, allowed Ms. Haley to triple her income in just three years. But they also led her into an ethical gray area that tarnished her first term as South Carolina’s governor.Ms. Haley did not disclose her Wilbur Smith contract until 2010, keeping it secret for more than three years. She also pushed for the hospital’s top priority — a new heart-surgery center — at the same time she was on its payroll. And Ms. Haley raised money for the hospital’s charitable foundation from lobbyists and businesses who may have had reason to curry favor with her.The donations, one lobbyist wrote, were a way of “sucking up” to a rising political player.The blurry line between Ms. Haley’s personal and public interests became the subject of a State House ethics investigation in 2012. The Republican-led committee concluded that Ms. Haley, by then the governor, had not violated any state ethics rules. But ethics experts and even some of her past supporters say the outcome was more an indictment of the lax rules and cozy ties between lawmakers and special interests than a vindication of her actions.“Was Nikki Haley acting unethically? Maybe,” said Scott English, who was chief of staff to former Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican and Ms. Haley’s predecessor. “Was she acting unethically according to the jungle rules of South Carolina politics at the time? Not at all.”Ms. Haley’s early ethics controversy is a far cry from the legal morass entangling her top rival for the Republican nomination, former President Donald J. Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges, including obstruction of justice and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Mr. Trump is also facing civil penalties for a yearslong fraud scheme involving his real estate business.Yet Ms. Haley’s actions broke ethical norms, according to Kedric Payne, who directs the ethics program for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. In most states, at least some of her conduct would have been out of bounds, he said, because it created the appearance of a conflict of interest.A core principle of most state ethics laws is that “you cannot have outside employment that could in any way conflict with your official duties,” Mr. Payne said.In South Carolina, the ethics investigation of Ms. Haley undermined her image as a broom-sweeping crusader working to shake up the political establishment — a persona she is still cultivating. Campaigning in New Hampshire on Saturday, Ms. Haley dismissed her lack of endorsements from politicians in her home state and in Washington as a result of her stances on transparency and ethics.“I’ve called elected officials out because accountability matters,” she said.The questions about Ms. Haley’s potential conflicts revealed how her work in politics had produced financial dividends almost from the beginning of her career in public life.In recent years, Ms. Haley has made millions from consulting fees, paid speeches, stock and seats on corporate boards. In the year leading up to her presidential bid, she made around $2.5 million in income on speaking engagements alone, according to her financial disclosures.This account of Ms. Haley’s early ethics troubles is drawn from testimony, filings and exhibits released by the South Carolina House in response to a public information request from The New York Times, as well as other documents, interviews and media accounts.Ms. Haley’s presidential campaign did not respond to questions about the controversy. She said at the time that she had followed the existing rules and cast the episode as an attempt by her political enemies to keep her from fighting South Carolina’s pay-to-play culture.“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” she told the ethics committee in 2012.Yet when she campaigned for a second term as governor, Ms. Haley worked to rehabilitate her image and ran on a promise to reform the state’s ethics rules. Once re-elected, she signed a law that outlawed secret sources of income like her Wilbur Smith contract.The lean yearsIn 2010, prodded by her opponent in her first run for governor, Ms. Haley disclosed six years of her joint tax returns with her husband, Michael Haley. They showed a stretch of modest earnings, thousands of dollars in penalties and interest for late tax payments, and close to $21,000 in business losses from Mr. Haley’s brief business venture, according to published accounts and summaries of the tax returns given to House ethics committee investigators.(Although Ms. Haley has repeatedly said that candidates for president should release their tax returns, she has not released her own, nor have her opponents in the Republican primary race.)Michael and Nikki Haley in New York in 2012. In 2010, she released six years of joint income tax returns showing a stretch of modest earnings.Uli Seit for The New York TimesAs young adults, both Ms. Haley and her husband had worked for her parents’ clothing business, Exotica International, she as the firm’s chief financial officer, he in charge of men’s wear. But the Haleys’ income from the store petered out in 2006, two years before it closed. The couple, who then were both in their mid-30s, had two children. Ms. Haley’s legislative job was only a part-time position. Mr. Haley joined the South Carolina National Guard that fall, but initially earned little.The Wilbur Smith contract helped fill in the financial gaps. The tax documents suggest that the engineering firm’s retainer amounted to nearly half of her family’s income of $64,000 in 2007.A top executive at the firm testified that he could recall only one or two meetings with Ms. Haley and that they never discussed state contracts. Ms. Haley said a House lawyer had advised her that she was not required to report the payments. She recused herself from a vote on one of the firm’s projects out of an abundance of caution, but voted on a second bill that canceled the project. She testified she didn’t see a conflict in that vote.Wilbur Smith ended her retainer in late 2008.Wearing two hatsBy then, Ms. Haley was onto something new. That summer, she asked Michael J. Biediger, then the chief executive of Lexington Medical Center, to hire her.Ms. Haley said her parents were either losing or selling their business, Mr. Biediger testified. Her job application listed her salary at Exotica as $125,000 and requested the same amount. But her tax returns indicated she never earned more than $47,000 a year from the clothing firm.Ms. Haley did not fill out or sign the application, a top aide told reporters, although the application stated that her typed name constituted a signature.Mr. Biediger created a $110,000-a-year position for Ms. Haley as a fund-raiser for the hospital’s foundation, a subsidiary of the hospital. At the time, she was a member of the powerful House Labor, Commerce and Industry committee and was also majority whip.He told the ethics committee he had hired her for her networking skills and personality and relied on a consulting firm’s recommendation to set her salary. A survey by the state’s Association of Nonprofit Organizations found that her salary was two and a half times as high as the average for similar organizations.The job came with inherent ethical dilemmas. Legislators were prohibited from serving as lobbyists, but now Ms. Haley was wearing two hats: as a lawmaker trying to help the hospital win state approval to open the heart-surgery center, and as a paid employee of a hospital subsidiary.Ms. Haley continued to work with other lawmakers on a plan to build support for the heart-surgery center, according to emails. She also spoke with an official on the state board with decision-making authority over the center, and communicated with hospital officials about the proposed project.Asked about her dual roles, Ms. Haley, who disclosed her hospital work on her financial disclosures, told the ethics committee she had kept her jobs separate.“I never had a legislative conversation in any way mixed with a foundation conversation,” she said.Ms. Haley also brushed off concerns that her fund-raising job opened up a potential avenue for special interests that might want to influence her. She solicited donations from various corporate interests, including an association of financial services firms and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina.To contact Blue Cross executives, Ms. Haley first reached out to a prominent lobbyist, Larry Marchant, she testified. Mr. Marchant told her that if the company contributed, “You are going to owe me,” she said, and she replied, “You know I don’t work like that.”The health insurer’s donations grew from $1,000 in 2007, the year before Ms. Haley joined the foundation, to $20,000 in 2010.In January of that year, as Ms. Haley was running for governor, Mr. Marchant advised the firm not to lower its donation, writing to one company official: “I’m still sucking up to Nikki in the event she comes on strong in the primary.”Blue Cross officials told the ethics committee they had conducted an internal investigation and determined that the donations were not an attempt to influence Ms. Haley, but a typical effort to build good will with the community.‘The people deserved to know’Ms. Haley and Lexington Medical cut ties during her campaign. As governor, she attacked the House ethics inquiry as a distraction engineered by Democrats. A surprise witness in her own defense, Ms. Haley accused the influential Republican lawyer who had filed the initial ethics complaint, John Rainey, of being a “racist, sexist bigot” and of suggesting that her family was related to terrorists. Mr. Rainey later said that Ms. Haley, whose parents are Indian immigrants, had misconstrued the remark.The Republican-led committee dismissed each of the charges with little explanation. Democrats argued that the lawmakers never fully investigated the allegations because they were loath to go up against a sitting governor.In South Carolina, the episode was soon overshadowed by a barrage of other corruption scandals. John Crangle, the former head of South Carolina’s chapter of Common Cause, said that Ms. Haley’s conduct didn’t “smell good,” but that it paled in comparison to the convictions of half a dozen legislators, including the Speaker of the House, of crimes involving misuse of campaign funds and payments from lobbyists.Ms. Haley promoting a plan for ethics reform in 2012, shortly after a state ethics investigation into her work on behalf of a hospital.Steve Jessmore/The Sun News, via Associated PressThe Center for Public Integrity, in a state-by-state survey of ethics rules, gave South Carolina an F rating in 2012, saying the state’s loopholes were “large enough to dock a Confederate submarine.”Soon after the ethics investigation, Ms. Haley went on a whistle-stop tour of the state promoting an ethics overhaul. In 2016, she signed two bills that required lawmakers to disclose the sources, but not the amounts, of private income, and revamped the process for reviewing allegations.Mr. Crangle said the changes did not go far enough.“Special interests want to invest large amounts of money to buy legislation and legislators, and Nikki never really challenged that institutional system of corruption,” he said.In her own retelling of her political rise, Ms. Haley made no mention of her ethics issues. In a 2012 memoir, she wrote that she believed that letting lawmakers hide the sources of their income — as she herself had done — was wrong.“It breeds conflicts of interest,” she wrote. “The people deserved to know who paid us.”Kitty Bennett More

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      DeSantis Won’t Loom as Large Over Florida Legislative Session This Year

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      With Gov. Ron DeSantis focused on the presidential primaries, the session that starts next week could be unusually low key.When the Florida Legislature begins its annual session on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis will be on hand — fleetingly. After giving his State of the State address, he will leave for Iowa, where he has a packed campaign schedule ahead of the Republican presidential caucuses on Jan. 15. Few in Tallahassee expect to see much of him in the months that follow.His absence will be a conspicuous change from the last few years, when Mr. DeSantis loomed large over the Legislature, his every major wish granted by friendly lawmakers. The Republicans who control both chambers were eager to curry favor with the state’s political superstar, who seemed poised to lead their party’s presidential field.Instead, Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid has struggled. His pitch to make America more like Florida has lost much of its fizz, with the frenzied culture wars that have gripped the state proving less appealing to a national audience. To date, the governor has lagged far behind former President Donald J. Trump in the polls.Mr. DeSantis’s job approval among Floridians has dipped, polls show. He remains a powerful figure, able to destroy lawmakers’ dreams with his veto. But everyone in the Capitol knows that Mr. DeSantis is not as invincible as he once seemed.“If he were the front-runner in the presidential race, things would be very different,” said State Representative Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat and the House minority leader. “He’s finding out that all these culture wars that he fought for in Florida aren’t winning him votes.”So lawmakers have prepared for a different kind of session, one that could feel like a breather after Mr. DeSantis’s resolve over the last two years to reshape state policies in eye-catching ways that he hoped would appeal to Republican primary voters.To be sure, Mr. DeSantis has proposed a budget that prioritizes some of his top issues on the campaign trail. He has asked for more money to fly newly arrived migrants from the Southwest border to states like Massachusetts and California, and to pay teachers extra if they take a state-sanctioned civics course with a clear conservative ideological bent.“The state is in really good fiscal shape,” Mr. DeSantis said last month when he announced his budget plan. “Here in Florida, we’re doing it right.”But while in previous years he barnstormed nearly every corner of Florida to stump for his proposals, unveiling new ones nearly every day as the Legislature prepared to convene, Mr. DeSantis spent the weeks leading to this session crisscrossing early voting states. It is unclear how long Mr. DeSantis will stay in the race if he does poorly in those contests. But by March 8, when the legislative session is scheduled to end, about half the states will have held their primaries.“It’s going to be a different session for sure,” said State Representative Randy Fine, a Brevard County Republican. But he added that a slower pace would merely reflect the governor’s success in transforming Florida over the past two years, noting, “He got everything passed.”Mr. DeSantis has enacted so many significant and divisive policies since 2021 that they — and the lawsuits challenging many of them — have become difficult to track.Vouchers toward private school tuition for all public school students who want them. Abortions restrictions after six weeks of pregnancy. Bans on diversity and equity programs at public universities. Death sentences without unanimous juries. Carrying concealed weapons without a permit. Redrawn congressional districts to further favor Republicans. Outlawing transition care for transgender children. Weaker tenure protections for public university professors. An office to investigate election crimes. Stripping Disney of some of its powers.But a month before the new session was scheduled to begin, as lawmakers met in Tallahassee for committee meetings, few could articulate the governor’s 2024 priorities. (A sex scandal involving the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, who is expected to be replaced on Monday, did not help).Privately, some lawmakers say they are just fine with a slower session — especially going into an election year, when many politicians would prefer to finish in Tallahassee quickly and then be free to campaign. That is, in fact, why every other year, legislative sessions in Florida begin in January rather than in March.New bills proposed by legislators include one that would remove state restrictions on when 16- and 17-year-olds can work, and others aiming to expand the health care work force.Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee lobbyist and co-chairman of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign finance committee, said that lawmakers and the governor have done more than just focus on culture war issues in recent years but that those issues have captured most of the attention. With fewer contentious proposals from Mr. DeSantis on tap, “the things that made him popular in Florida,” such as raising teacher pay and funding Everglades restoration, might get more notice, Mr. Iarossi said.Democrats, who hold little sway in Republican-controlled Tallahassee, accuse the governor of being an absentee executive while he campaigns for higher office. They say he and Republican lawmakers have failed to help Floridians get relief from steep housing and insurance costs.Floridians “wonder why the government is so focused on banning books,” Ms. Driskell said. “They want to know, ‘What is the Legislature doing for me?’ And we have no answer for them, because everything has been about DeSantis’s ambitions.”In his new budget, Mr. DeSantis recommended a one-year exemption on taxes, fees and assessments on property insurance for homes worth up to $750,000. Floridians’ rates rose by an average of 57 percent in 2022, the highest in the nation.Kathleen Passidomo, the Senate president, said Mr. DeSantis is still in Tallahassee often — “He’s here more than you think” — and even when he is away, stays in frequent touch.And lawmakers know that, even if the governor bows out of the presidential race, he will remain a political force in the Capitol, with three more years left in his term.“He still has his veto pen,” Ms. Driskell said. More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      How to Boost Voter Turnout With Just One Signature

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      In a rare bit of political good news in the final days of 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has signed into law legislation aimed at increasing voter turnout.For so many people, the temptation to tune out in this moment of uninspiring politics is stronger than ever. But in Albany, as in Washington, one of the clearest ways to build a saner, more responsive political system is to vastly increase the number of voters who cast ballots.The bill enacted by Ms. Hochul and the State Legislature would do just that, by moving many county and local elections across New York to even-numbered years, aligning them with federal, statewide and State Legislature elections that draw more voters to the polls.Abysmally low turnout in New York is a key culprit behind Albany’s dysfunctional politics, which sometimes seem mystifyingly divorced from the urgent needs of millions of residents. Consider, for example, the state’s failure over the past year to address a brutal housing crisis by adopting policies to build housing in the New York City suburbs and enact protections for tenants such as requiring a good cause for evictions.When smaller numbers of people show up at the polls, elections are less competitive, enhancing the power of special interests — from donors to industry lobbyists and the so-called NIMBYs who have resisted the development of much-needed housing across New York State.The research backs this up. One report, from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that changing local elections to coincide with national elections led to more accountable and responsive government and saved taxpayers money.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Defeating Trump Is Just a Start

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      The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.But there is another angle you can take on the Republican use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.At the same time, it is hard not to miss the degree to which attempts to nullify popular referendums or redistrict opponents into irrelevance can also work to inculcate a sense of hopelessness in those who might otherwise seek political change. Yes, it is true that many people will push back when faced with a sustained challenge to their right to participate in political life or exercise other fundamental rights. But many people will resign themselves to the new status quo, persuading themselves that nothing has fundamentally changed or concluding that it is not worth the time or effort involved to pick up the fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More