Roughly three weeks before the May 5 Republican primary, state Reps. Gary Click (R-Vickery) and Rodney Creech (R-West Alexandria) have become the two endorsements Ohio Republican campaigns can’t scrub fast enough — or quietly restore fast enough when they hope no one is looking.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign removed both names from vivekforohio.com/endorsements within two days of TiffinOhio.net reporting on Creech’s BCI investigation and resurfaced video of Click reminiscing about talking to “young girls” about sex. Click scrambled back onto the page within hours of the reporting and told followers the removal was “greatly exaggerated.” Web Archive snapshots proved otherwise.

OH-9 congressional candidate Josh Williams quietly removed Creech from his own endorsements page the same week. As of Saturday, Creech is again listed at joshwilliamsforohio.com/endorsements — reinstated without public acknowledgement. Click, endorsed by Williams since August 2025, never left Williams’ page.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno was dropped as the headliner of Click’s campaign kickoff when the event was rescheduled in March. Neither Click nor Moreno addressed the change. Eric Watson, Click’s Republican primary challenger, called the three-term incumbent “a liability” on April 13.

But the pattern isn’t two unlucky lawmakers caught in the same news cycle. Click and Creech are legislative partners. And Click’s own documented record — his own words on the Ohio House floor — is what turns their alliance from coincidence into a pattern the Ohio GOP keeps trying, and failing, to get rid of.

What Click said about young girls

In 2023, Click testified before the Ohio House Public Health Policy Committee in support of House Bill 68, his legislation to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

During the hearing, Click told committee members that “young girls” had described to him how painful it was for them to have sex.

Click, a former senior pastor at Fremont Baptist Temple, has never publicly identified who those young girls were, how old they were, in what setting the conversations occurred, or why a pastor was discussing sex with minors at all. A leaked 2022 audio recording previously revealed that Click had never spoken with a single transgender person before introducing HB 68’s predecessor bill — the same legislative vehicle he now sponsors under the title “Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act.”

Click quietly stepped down as senior pastor of Fremont Baptist Temple in 2025, assuming the honorary title of pastor emeritus, a transition first reported by TiffinOhio.net.

What Creech is accused of

In 2023, a minor female relative accused Creech of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation records obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau. Text messages showed the minor complaining that Creech had been rubbing her legs and grabbing her waist and that she was “put to tears” from being so uncomfortable around him, according to NBC4.

Creech told investigators he had gotten into bed with the minor in his underwear but denied the sexual nature of the allegations. Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, brought in as a special prosecutor after the Preble County sheriff and prosecutor recused themselves because of personal relationships with Creech, declined to file charges — but wrote that Creech’s “behavior during the time of the investigation was concerning and suspicious.”

In February 2026, after Creech publicly dismissed his own daughter’s statements about the alleged conduct as “textbook parental alienation”, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman reinstated him to his four committee assignments, signed a letter requesting the Ohio Republican Party endorse him for re-election, and the party obliged.

How Click wrote Creech’s defense into legislation

Three weeks after Creech invoked “parental alienation” to dismiss his daughter, Click introduced House Bill 693, titled the Affirming Families First Act. Co-sponsored by Williams, the bill would write a statutory definition of “parental alienation” into Ohio law — a concept that researchers, child welfare advocates, and the United Nations have described as pseudoscience weaponized in family court to discredit children who report abuse.

Parental alienation syndrome was developed by Dr. Richard Gardner, a psychiatrist who built a career as a paid expert witness in more than 400 child custody cases, most often testifying on behalf of fathers accused of sexually abusing their children. ProPublica has documented cases in which parental alienation claims overrode prior substantiated findings of abuse and placed children in the custody of the parent they said had abused them.

HB 693 would embed that framework directly into Ohio statute. Under its definition, a child’s rejection of a parent — including a child’s resistance to contact with a parent they say abused them — could be characterized as parental alienation if the child has allied with a support network outside the home.

It is the same framework Creech used to discredit his own daughter in a public Facebook exchange in February. Click’s bill would give that framework the force of law.

The legislative alliance

HB 693 is not the only bill Click and Creech have attached themselves to in tandem.

Both men are cosponsors of House Bill 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act,” which the Ohio House passed 63-30 on March 25. The bill’s sponsors market it as a child protection measure. During committee testimony, Planned Parenthood of Ohio’s Danielle Firsich called out the contradiction: “You have a man who was just put back on his committees, who was accused of sexual misconduct with a minor, who is a sponsor on this bill.”

Click and Creech are also among the 28 Republican cosponsors of House Bill 649, which would require every licensed child care center in Ohio to install surveillance cameras with live remote access for state officials. Hundreds of commenters called the bill “creepy” and “insane” across Facebook and X. The word used most often to describe Creech in those comment threads was “pedophile.”

Click has built his political brand around protecting children. Creech is accused of climbing into bed with one. Their legislative partnership is not an accident of the alphabet.

Husted: the holdout

The one Ohio Republican who has not walked away from either man is also the one in the most competitive race on the 2026 ballot.

U.S. Sen. Jon Husted is running in the November special election to retain the seat appointed to him by Gov. Mike DeWine after JD Vance became vice president. His opponent is former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.

On March 19, the Husted campaign posted an endorsement graphic on X listing dozens of Ohio House Republicans backing his bid. Both Click and Creech were on it. The campaign reposted the graphic hours later. Husted’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether the campaign was aware of the allegations against Creech, according to Heartland Signal.

Click is not just an endorser. He is listed as Husted’s Sandusky County campaign chair on a county-by-county leadership graphic the campaign posted on Dec. 10, 2025.

Also on the March 19 endorsement graphic: Rep. Phil Plummer (R-Dayton), who told BCI investigators that Creech’s comments about the allegations were “disgusting, uncalled for, and appalling.” Plummer shares an endorsement list with the lawmaker he described that way. So does Huffman, who had asked Creech to resign nine months before reinstating him.

Most other high-profile Ohio Republicans have moved — publicly or quietly — to create distance. Ramaswamy scrubbed Creech and tried to scrub Click. Moreno abandoned the kickoff. Williams deleted Creech before putting him back. Watson, running against Click directly, has made Click’s toxicity the core of his primary pitch.

Husted, in the tightest Senate race of the cycle, has done none of those things.

The Creech model

When endorsers walk away, Click posts through it. He framed his Ramaswamy removal as “greatly exaggerated.” He has repeatedly urged constituents on his official state representative Facebook page, his campaign page, and his personal profile not to believe TiffinOhio.net reporting. He has not addressed the substance of any of it.

Creech, who has denied the allegations and called the reporting “demonstrably false,” at least had the situational awareness not to scramble back onto a page he’d been scrubbed from. He remains absent from Ramaswamy’s endorsements page as of Saturday.

The Republican primary for Ohio House District 88, which covers Seneca and Sandusky counties, is May 5. Click faces Watson in the GOP primary and Democrat Aaron Jones in the November general election. The Republican primary for House District 40, which covers Preble County and portions of Montgomery and Butler counties, is also May 5. Creech faces former state Rep. J. Todd Smith and Lew Lainhart.