More Oh-Oh-Ohio

The AP has the following on the House version of this legislation:

If strip-club patrons touch nude or seminude employees in specific areas or on clothing covering specific areas, they can be charged with a penalty of up to six months in jail. If patrons touch a nude or seminude employee anywhere else, they could receive up to 30 days in jail. The same applies to nude or seminude employees touching patrons.

So you can go to jail for a maximum of 6 months for being drunk and grabbing a tit.

This bill represents a compromise on the Senate version and the CCV has apparently signed off on this version. If their goal was prevent prostitution, this definitely doesn’t do it. Now the strippers will be right on top of the patrons. Grinding all over them. Saints preserve us!

The compromise version also allows clubs to stay open past midnight if the strippers are not nude. And we come to the real issue: nudity. Just cover it up and you can keep doing what you’re doing.

And then there’s this poor soul who thinks that communities cannot develop their own standards, but must have those standards mandated to them:

The General Assembly has had nearly four years to do something with this legislation which would eliminate the need for individual towns and townships to come up with their own club regulations. – Stephen Kilpatrick

I wonder if Mr. Kilpatrick is part of the 34 percent mentioned earlier.

The Ohio Patron’s Prayer: Lord, please protect us from these nude sirens. Cover them scantily that we may view them without sin. Amen.

Our Failing Civic Health

The National Conference of State Legislatures’ blog – The Thicket – has a report on the status civic education.

The status: Not Good

• In grade 4, only 24 percent of students scored at a proficient level, meaning they “demonstrated at least competency over challenging subject matter.”
• Of eighth-graders, 22 percent scored at or above the Proficient level.
• Twenty-seven percent of twelfth-graders scored at or above the Proficient level.

For a Republic to survive, it must have an educated and engaged citizenry, so the fact that so few students have a competent understanding of our government is disturbing.

Considering that studies have also shown that students do not have a good understanding of the surrounding world, we have a serious problem when one considers the future of this country.

Oh-Oh-Ohio

Seems to be a great lot of concern about strip clubs in Ohio, generated by the group Citizens for Community Values, whose mission statement reads:

Citizens for Community Values (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.

The group is apparently behind new legislation to keep strippers 6 ft. from patrons and to ban operation of a sexually oriented business between the hours of midnight and 6 AM.

The bill analysis for Senate Bill 16 summarises the bill thusly:

• Prohibits a sexually oriented business from remaining open between midnight and 6 a.m., unless the business is covered by a liquor permit that authorizes operation during those hours, in which case it may remain open provided that it does not conduct, offer, or allow any sexually oriented entertainment activity during those hours.
• Prohibits employees of the business, while on the premises of the business and in a state of nudity or semi-nudity, from knowingly:  (a) appearing in the view of a patron, unless at least six feet away and on a stage at least two feet off the floor, (b) touching any patron or their clothing, or (c) touching any other person who is nude or seminude while in the view of any patron.
• Prohibits any patron of a sexually oriented business from knowingly touching any employee of the business who is nude or seminude.

Dave Miller, vice-president of the CCV, had this to say about the requirements:

“The goal is still accomplished. You can stop the crime taking place inside these clubs, particularly the prostitution crimes with that.”

As with the enforcement of the ordinance in Houston, aren’t there already laws against prostitution, and if so, why not enforce those? Keeping them 6ft from one another and having them operate in daylight will somehow stop the prositution which is supposedly occuring? The solution does not address the stated problem, particularly when you consider that the bill prohibits a stripper from touching a another stripper while in view of a patron. Those dirty girls, prostituting themselves out to each other.

Maybe I’m just not going to the right clubs or bookstores, because I’ve never seen  prostitution taking place, nor have I ever seen an increased level of crime at these establishments (and I have been in some dirty strip clubs). Kinda disappointing. Maybe I should ask the CCV where they’re hanging out.

But as the prohibition on stripper to stripper contact shows, this is not about a concern for the level of crime or the well-being of the strippers; it’s about enshrining some prudish, Victorian morality – as long as we don’t see it, it’s not happening – which is more concerned with style than substance.

And with nearly half of Ohioans having visited a strip club, perhaps the CCV should probably focus their efforts on reforming the population, rather than passing inane laws which do not change the behaviour, just the appearance, because even 34 percent of white, born again, evangelicals (the CCV’s constituency) admitted to having visited a strip club.