One point I’ve made over the years is, if you really want to know what Republicans think, look at state and local Republicans, not the national ones, who are usually more polished. From Ohio (boldface mine):

Republicans in the state General Assembly, meanwhile, are pushing sweeping legislation to weaken Ohio’s vaccination laws — for all vaccines, not just COVID-19. On Tuesday, anti-vaccination activists crammed into the House Health Committee hearing room to testify in support of House Bill 248.

The legislation would ban vaccine requirements on customers, employees or students from businesses, hospitals, nursing homes, K-12 schools, colleges, daycares, or others. It would also prevent governments, insurers, or businesses from offering incentives for people to get vaccinated, or even requesting that people get vaccinated….

Under the bill, a small business owned by asthmatics or cancer survivors — both of whom are at higher risk of serious COVID-19 complications — would have no legal right to require or even request that employees or customers who come inside be vaccinated. That’s according to Dorit Reiss, a professor with a focus on vaccine policy from the UC Hastings College of Law…

House Bill 248 wouldn’t exist in a vacuum; it would intertwine with preexisting weak school immunization requirements and recent legislation that defanged the Ohio Department of Health’s pandemic power…

The Ohio Association of Health Plans, which represents health insurers in Ohio, issued a statement opposing the bill Tuesday.

“HB 248 would put put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses,” said its spokesman Dan Williamson. “This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis.”

The bill would especially hurt insurers, as it would remove their ability to require, request, or incentivize vaccination among the pool of clients whose health care costs they pay for.

Of course, you can’t have anti-vaccination lunacy without the ‘H-word’:

One proponent of the bill, a Black woman, decried business or government’s distinguishing between vaccinated or unvaccinated people as “medical apartheid.” The language echoes comments made last week from Rep. Jennifer Gross, who sponsored the bill, comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, Sen. Andrew Brenner, who himself promised he wouldn’t let the state health director turn Ohio into Nazi Germany last summer, is scheduled to introduce similar legislation to a Senate panel.

This is absolute lunacy. Leaving the pandemic aside, people, mostly children, will be crippled or killed if this legislation is passed. And the supposed ‘party of life’ doesn’t care.

Politically, as too often happens, we’re having an ersatz debate between semi-sane Republicans and the bugshitcrazytarian Republicans. Ohio Democrats aren’t pushing this (though they have no power to speak of).

How Democrats are supposed to compromise with people like this escapes me. Someone needs to tell Senate Democrats that there are no ten righteous Republicans in their ideological Sodom and Gomorrah. You can’t negotiate with people this far gone, you just have to stop them.