CINCINNATI, OH – Last year, the Ohio General Assembly approved House Bill 23, a law that strengthened the hand of Ohio’s townships, but not Ohio’s cities, to impose strict guidelines for operation on wide variety of “adult businesses.”Despite its sweeping findings and the multiple new restrictions the legislation imposed on Ohio’s adult businesses, Cincinnati-based anti-porn activists with the Citizens for Community Values (CCV) say that House Bill 23 simply doesn’t go far enough.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, the CCV has now submitted a new bill to the Ohio General Assembly and says that if the law isn’t passed in a form it likes, the group will gather signatures to place their legislation on the November 2007 general election ballot.
“We’re cautiously optimistic, but we’re not depending on the legislature to make this happen,” said CCV head, Phil Burress, according to the Dispatch. “
Burress said that if the General Assembly does not pass the CCV’s proposal, which the CCV has coined the “Community Defense Act,” by the end of April, the CCV will take action to bring their measure directly to Ohio’s voters in November.
“If they don’t pass it in a form that closes down all sexually oriented businesses at midnight and keeps dancers six feet away from patrons, we have June and July to collect another approximately 114,000 good signatures to put it on the ballot,” said Burress.
CCV already gathered over 200,000 signatures required to submit the proposal to the state legislature, but will have to collect signatures all over again if they intend to make it a ballot measure on the November election.
Burress said his group isn’t happy with the law created by House Bill 23, because the bill does not include a distance requirement to prevent contact between topless dancers and club patrons, doesn’t restrict the operating hours for adult businesses, and the new law applies only to Ohio’s townships.
“There’s three reasons we’re doing this: Crime, crime, crime,” Burress said, according to the Dispatch.
According to its website, CCV “exists to promote Judeo-Christian moral values and to reduce destructive behaviors contrary to those values through education, active community partnership, and individual empowerment at the local, state, and national levels.”
Among its many campaigns within the state of Ohio, the CCV spearheaded the push for an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage, a measure approved by Ohio voters in the November 2004 election.
