Newsflash: Holcomb is not a conservative
Indiana's governor goes clubbing with transgenders in the middle of a culture war
I would never have believed that Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb would have vetoed the bill that banned transgenders from playing on girls’ sports teams.
Not EVER….really, just based on the John Hostettler connection alone.
Eric Holcomb worked for Rep. John Hostettler for close to six years, starting in 1997 — first in Hostettler’s office in Vincennes, then managing his 2002 campaign, then as field director, into 2003.
Congressman John Hostettler, if you don’t know him, was elected in the Republican Revolution in 1994 to represent Indiana’s 8th congressional district, which then included Bloomington.
I met John Hostettler when he came to the Indiana University-Bloomington campus to give a speech in January of 1995. It was the first speech he’d given in the district since since he’d been elected to represent the district that was then known as Bloody Eighth — so called because exactly ten years earlier, the Indiana Secretary of State had declared challenger Richard McIntyre the winner of the race, decreeing that he’d defeated first-term congressman Frank McCloskey by about 400 votes after McCloskey had been up 72 points in the initial count, before a tabulation error was discovered.
McIntyre went to Washington, but the Democrats who controlled Congress refused to seat him and launched an investigation, led by then-Congressman Leon Panetta. Panetta and the national Democrats overturned the results of Indiana’s election as certified by Indiana’s county clerks and by our Secretary of State and declared McCloskey the winner by FOUR VOTES, seating him. It was the theft of an election. It was totally outrageous and Republicans, including a then young Rep. Newt Gingrich, raised hell about it.
So when John Hostettler took the seat back for Republicans in 1994, it was a very, very big deal. I remember him saying in his speech that elder statesmen in Congress had come up to him, placed their hands on his shoulders and told him how glad they were that he’d won it back — the seat that had been stolen a decade before.
And Hostettler wasn’t just any old Republican.
“Hostettler was a hard, hard-core conservative and libertarian. He was both at the same time,” a friend of mine says.
John Hostettler was such a big gun guy that in a talk at a school in 1995 or 1996, he reportedly gave a shrug when asked if he thought nuclear weapons fell under the Second Amendment. His staffers said that the school bell rang, and so he didn’t have a chance to answer. But we’ll never know! Anyway, maybe they do. I mean, where does it say they don’t?
Hostettler was so pro-gun, my friend says, that he used to tell people, “I don’t like the NRA.” He would say: “They’ve let me down too many times. I like the Gun Owners of America.”
The motto of the Gun Owners of America is “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.” (NO COMPROMISE.)
When I was working in D.C. a couple of years out of college, I interviewed for a position in Hostettler’s Capitol Hill office. I can’t remember what position — either legislative correspondent or legislative assistant, in all likelihood.
I remember in the interview Curt Smith, Hostettler’s then chief of staff, telling me they were going after IU and the Kinsey Institute, to get the records of Kinsey’s research, which, as a lot of you know, is tied to some pretty sick abuse of children by a hard-core pedophile. They wanted to expose the crimes and the criminals and expose the fraud that’s been passed off as science for years — junk science that has led us straight to this nutty notion of “gender fluidity” and boys thinking they’re girls.
I knew a little about Kinsey as I’d had a class on the first floor of Morrison Hall on the IU campus when the institute was on the second floor, and remember one day I’d tried to climb the narrow stairs (because it’s a public university, after all, so why not?) and had been stopped in the middle of the flight of stairs by a frantic female staffer who’d heard my footsteps and rushed out to stop my unauthorized entry, or even appearance at the doorway.
I wonder what they were doing up there that they didn’t want an innocent undergrad knocking on the door? It was pretty strange.
But back to Hostettler. He was also one of the few Republican members of Congress to make a pledge to not take any PAC money, and never did — which made it hard for him to raise enough money to ward off well-funded Democratic challengers every two years.
But it also gave him the freedom to speak his mind.
In October of 2002, he was one of just six Republican members of Congress to vote against the Iraq war, and in 2008, two years after he’d been defeated by a better-funded Democrat, he refused to support John McCain, publicly announcing that he was instead supporting the Libertarian Party candidate.
All of this is to explain how truly principled John Hostettler was, and how absolutely unreal it is that Eric Holcomb could have worked for him for almost six years…how he could have campaigned for him in evangelical churches through these rural counties like Knox and Posey and Daviess and Greene, how he could have spent weekends with Hostettler talking to farmers and walking in small-town parades…how he could have learned the ropes of Southern Indiana politics in these years and then, as governor of the state a few years later, sided with transgender activists who deny the existence of biological sex — who insist that a boy is only a boy if he says he’s a boy, and that if tomorrow he decides he’s a girl then everyone has to call him a girl and he can use the girls’ bathroom and undress in the girls’ locker room.
Holcomb said in his veto letter that he doesn’t see evidence that there’s a problem that requires government intervention, but if you saw the people who amassed at the Statehouse for hearings on House Bill 1041, authored by Michelle Davis, you could clearly see that the problem is already on our doorstep. They chanted and shouted and cursed the legislators after their vote. Many of these transgender activists work in schools or are connected to people who do, or have children in schools. They are determined to push this issue into every corner of the state and will.
And as Micah Clark of the American Family Association of Indiana said to me on the phone the morning after Holcomb’s veto of HB 1041: “It’s not just about competition. It’s about protecting women’s privacy.”
If you can’t say that a team or track is gender-specific, then you can’t say a locker room is gender-specific, says Clark: “That’s the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.”
Oh, but we must.
Because Lia Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who was just awarded the first-place finish in the NCAA swimming and diving championship for the 500-yard freestyle, was allowed to undress, shower and parade around the women’s locker room displaying male anatomy — which would be a crime in any other context.
Holcomb won’t get his way. Speaker of the House Todd Huston said on Tuesday the House will vote to override the veto in May. And it shouldn’t be a problem, given that the bill passed easily 66-30 and only a simple majority is required to override a veto.
In the Senate, the bill passed 32-18. To override the governor’s veto, it will take 26 votes. Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray said on Tuesday the Senate will probably vote to override the governor’s veto after the House does.
Can they get it done??
Yes, they can and probably will.
But never will Hoosiers forget Holcomb’s veto of this bill.
The rumors have been flying for more than two years now that he’ll run for the U.S. Senate, and Mike Braun will run for governor.
But I think this vote means he’s not ever planning on running in any Republican primary ever again.
So if he’s shooting for the Senate, he’s devised a plan to get there that doesn’t rely on the votes of the Republican base.
Otherwise, he’s most likely heading for a job in the private sector.
Margaret, thank you for sharing your passion and skill. We would rarely get such insights without you.