Ohio Strip Club law

[Zak Tyler]

$50 bareback

damn they're cheaper than nunley.

[cgarison]

Note to self....

Reconsider transfer to Columbus.

[Dr. Whiplash]

'Scuse me for the serious turn, but here's an excellent commentary on the strip club law from Columbus Dispatch editor Joe Hallett...

I called Phil Burress on Thursday and said I was thinking about writing a nasty column about him unless he could talk me out of it. Why, he wondered, did I want to dump on him?

Because, I replied, I resented that a self-described former porn addict with three marriages and two bankruptcies had set himself up as the moral arbiter for me and the rest of Ohioans.

"That was 25 years ago," Burress said of his problems, "and I've never run away from that. The individual I was back then is different than the individual I am now. And I'm not a moral arbiter for anybody. If anything, I'm a crime crusader."

Burress' inspiring personal story has been well-chronicled, including the epiphany that landed him where he is today -- head of Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values. On Sept. 6, 1980, Burress, then 38, walked into a church ministered by his son-in-law, whose sermon stirred him to realize "that my life was not going in the direction it should be," and he immediately turned away from an adulthood of debauchery.

Although Burress, 65, is not an ordained minister, he has become sort of a Jerry Falwell of Ohio, learning how to manipulate the levers of political power to codify a conservative moral agenda. In 2004, Burress was largely responsible for Ohioans voting overwhelmingly to amend their constitution to ban same-sex marriages.

One of Burress' latest crusades is against strip-clubs. For two years, he has pressed the General Assembly for new regulations that would close down strip clubs after midnight and prohibit patrons from coming within six feet of a stripper. He threatened to take the issue to Ohio voters in the 2008 election if lawmakers didn't pass the law sought by his group. Last week, his group blessed a revised version prohibiting strippers from being touched in certain erogenous zones, an undeniably good idea.

But throughout the long and inane debate, Burress has managed to make legislators look like fools and to humanize strippers as, among other things, young women trying to pay for college and moms who want the best for their children.

Strip clubs, Burress argued, are magnets for crime, and new state regulations are needed to help municipalities and townships deal with it. Tellingly, the influential municipal and township-trustees lobbies have remained neutral on the bill. Lawmakers already have expanded townships' ability to regulate strip clubs.

Republicans controlling the Ohio General Assembly used to be for such local control. But they have danced to Burress' tune because they are scared of him. More than a handful of legislators and their staffers privately have spoken of the fear that Burress will line up primary-election opponents for Republicans if they buck his agenda.

Little more than a year ago, Senate President Bill Harris publicly complained that Burress was trying to bully him into passing the strip-club bill by threatening to defeat GOP senators who were not supportive.

Over the last year, Ohio lost more jobs than any state except Michigan. Ohio's unemployment rate has hovered around 45th. Only five states have seen more of their young people (ages 15 to 44) flee for opportunities elsewhere. And for two years, and particularly the last month in the House, lawmakers have embarrassed themselves by being preoccupied with strip-club legislation, subjugating the real business of the people to the moral agenda of Phil Burress.

Talk around the Statehouse is that Burress' next crusade will be to prohibit gay Ohioans from adopting children or foster parenting. When he ties up the legislature with that issue, I'll call Burress again and give him a chance to talk me out of writing a nasty column.

It probably won't work then, either.

[Lester]

And for two years, and particularly the last month in the House, lawmakers have embarrassed themselves by being preoccupied with strip-club legislation, subjugating the real business of the people to the moral agenda of Phil Burress.

A-freakin'-men.