Oh for the baby, but ahead of the bold. You know, a
wise man once said to me that lies circle the globe before truth can take
its first step. Some in the media the last few hours has been tying
this tire around the neck of Bill Sites, claiming that Bill Sites wants to
eliminate the skirt game in del High of which yours truly has been a participant
for many years. So let's go to the source. Let's go to Bill
Sits, who's the conscience of the Ohio House also the House Majority leader about
the bill. Bill Sites, welcome again to the Bill Cunningham Show. And
first of all, at the top, let's talk about your efforts, according
to some to ban the skirt game. Can you talk to the ridiculousness of
that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, it's an absurd proposition.
It's categorically false. This is a new bill that has been introduced by two
of my colleagues, one of whom is a very good attorney from Toledo,
the other of whom is a very accomplished businesswoman from Salina, Ohio, and
it has forty three co sponsors along with the two main sponsors. Both the
main sponsors and our House legal counsels have assured me before I signed on as
a co sponsor that in no way does this prohibit things like the skirt game
or even the drag queens reading to the little kids in the libraries. Rather,
this only applies in the event that the performance is of material that are
harmful to miners or obscene, both defined in current Ohio law, which has
long been upheld as constitutional, and that the performance appeals to the purious interests,
which, as you know, willie as the standard of Miller Versus California
and a long line of US Supreme Court cases about when the state may act
to restrict adult oriented entertainment. And I know this to be true because in
two thousand and six, Lou Blessing and I worked on a bill that came
over from the Ohio Senate was plainly unconstitutional. We changed it to make it
constitutional, so a lot of these definitions that are in current law were put
there. Back in two thousand and six, the strip clubs asked us to
please pass the bill in the form the Senate sent it over, so they
could run off to court and get it and joined. But Lou and I
said, we have too much professional pride for that, so we changed it.
It was passed in revised form. It's been held constitutional. This bill
simply builds off those definitions, and in no way, shape or form does
it in any way sanction or criminalize the venerable old skirt game, which I've
witnessed myself, or even drag queens reading to the kids in the library.
Men can dress up as women, women can us up as man. That's
not prohibited in any way, shape or formed by the bill. It doesn't
criminalize the production of Missus, Doubtfire or any of these other movies that have
featured performers in drag. We are talking about performance that is obscene, or
that involves material harmful to miners, or that appeals to the purient interest,
and in those circumstances, just as we require adult strip clubs to have a
license from the state and to restrict admission to people eighteen and over, so
also we are going to say that these sexualized obscene performances must be done in
an adult established license environment where children are not permitted in That's all this bill
does. Frankly, I'm not sure it does all that much, because if
the performance is obscene, we can probably go after it under current law without
requiring that they get a license. But this bill, the bill sponsors,
believe it's important to shield our young people from overly sexualized performances. Where these
folks are running around waving giant salluses in the air, some of them are
going topless. That's the kind of stuff that this bill seeks to regulate through
saying that you have to do that in an adult entertainment establishment like a strip
club, and children under eighteen are not permitted. In no way does it
have a damn thing to do with a skirt game or missus doubtfire or any
of the other nonsense that the organized Left is promoting on their blogs today.
And the sadness is legitimate. Media outlets want to mislead the easily misled.
You create this diatribe that somehow the skirt game or even a drag queen and
a library reading to kids is somehow prohibited but by the stick in the mud
bill sites types. And so now we have media outlets calling the head of
the skirt game talking about this as ridiculous. I've business skirt games. Are
they sexualized presentations? No? Are they obscene? By definition? They're fun.
Is literally it's got nothing to do with it. But see that's not
a story. And this relates to what's going to happen on January. On
August the sixth, So this is part of the effort by the media August
eighth, This is part of the efforts by the Media's great this background that
the moral Hezbollah are people like Bill Sites that want to criminalize put in prison
the first baseman at the skirt game. And so what you just said is
reasonable, but that's that that couldn't excite people. So you understand the game
the media plays well, I do. And and you know what disappoints me
is they go running off half cocked with this story without ever having actually read
the bill. They also don't realize that only about fifteen percent of all the
bills that are ever introduced to become law, and that bills before they are
ever passed, go through a long series of committee hearings and vetting and amendments.
And that's why I told the story about the two thousand and six stip
Club Bill. When that bill came over from the Senate, it was an
unconstitutional mess. And lu Blessing, you remember, good old Lue Blessing lou
and I were on the committee that was assigned that bill, and we changed
it and we made it constitutional. And the strip clubs were very unhappy with
us, because they wanted the bill pass just in the form that the Senate
pass it so they could get it declared unconstitutional. We didn't do that.
And in this case, the bill sponsors have worked very carefully with our House
Legal Counsel to distinguish what's in this bill from similar bills that overreached and were
declared unconstitutional in Tennessee, in Arkansas, and possibly Florida. We learned from
the mistakes made in other states. We craft the bill so as to meet
these constitutional objections, and that's what we do. That's what I've done.
And you know, anybody in the adult entertainment business knows that I was the
one defending their First Amendment right, but regulating it to the extent we could,
just to the extent of obscene material, material harmful to miners, material
that appeals to the prairie and interest. You and I as lawyers know that
those of illegal standards, and we have to be very sure that we have
defined those we do in current law. This bill simply builds on those current
definitions that have passed constitutional muster time and again, no story there, there
is there, no exploritation, well there and there. Yeah, well well
you know, I mean it's it really is kind of a shame. And
like I say, they're jumping on this bill right out of the gate to
make some sort of a statement. But the fact of the matter is this
bill. Before I signed up for it, I said, oh my god,
what are we doing this for? But I talked to both the sponsors
and our House legal counsel, and I was absolutely assured by all of them.
This does not criminalize cross dressing. It does not prohibit the gay drag
queens, readings of the kids in the library. Certainly, nobody even thought
about the start game down here. That's that's not even remotely what this was
about. Okay, well that's not a news story, so you got to
make things up. Secondly, I know who he is. John Legend came
to a Cincinnati today. John Legend is a clown. Nonetheless, he had
two hundred people around him at the Board of Elections saying that the vote August
eighth is about freedom of speech, that the Republicans don't want you at freedom
of speech the Republicans on August eighth to want to have one man, one
vote that somehow you've lost democracy. I see signs around Madeera that says democracies
on the ballot. Vote no on August eighth, to vote yes in November.
Here we go. Can you give us a synopsis as to why John
Legend talking about the First Amendment and talking about women's rights and democracies on the
ballot one man, one vote is a bunch of bovine scatology. Well,
well, well it is. Thirty two states in this country do not allow
any citizen initiated constitutional amenders, thirty two of the fifty. Of the remaining
eighteen, many of them do have supermajority requirements for approval of citizen initiated constitutional
amendments, including for example, Florida is it's a sixty percent threshold. The
United States Constitution requires a two thirds vote of both the US House and Senate
and then seventy five percent, not sixty percent, seventy five percent of the
states to ratify that constitutional nument. That's what Madison and Hamilton and Jefferson devised
when they came up with our constitution. It served the test of time over
two ur and forty seven years. I want to be like Madison and Hamilton
and Jefferson. The Democrats don't want an Issue one to pass. They haven't
been successful in electing any statewide officials in a long time. We have supermajorities
in the Ohio House and Senate as Republicans, So the only way they can
push their leftist agenda is by trying to hoodwink the gullible public into passing all
kinds of leftist initiatives at the polls. And that's what we're trying to cut
off at the path with this U one. It's true to the founders,
it's true to what the majority of states in this country already do. And
frankly, you know, I agree that timing is less than ideal. But
at the same time, I'm going to vote yes. My guest is most
Republicans will vote yes, most Democrats will vote no, and the battle,
as always, will be over the independent voters. But that's really what Issue
one is all about. And I don't know who died and make John Legend
a constitutional expert, you know, but I guess people can listen to him
if they want to. But it's really not nearly as egregious as the organized
left is making it out to see. So right now, there's thirty two
states that have none of the constitutional initiative. That's sixty four percent of the
states have none of it. And the states that do have it require shall
I use the term a supermajority, because there's not many of them do how
many do it? I said, many of those eighteen have some kind of
supermajority requires. So there at fifty five percent, summer at sixty some require
it to pass on two successive elections. That's another way to make sure we're
not doing things in haste and stupid. So, so you know this is
nothing radical. Ohio put this fifty percent plus one provision in its constitution back
in nineteen twelve. That was the era of Woodrow Wilson progressivism. It was
a very bad era in the American history. It was the birth of the
organized liberal group. And people say, well, we've had it since nineteen
twelve. Well, I would submit, we made a mistake in nineteen twelve,
and we're trying to correct them. Well, plus e versus Ferguson was
in eighteen ninety six, and that was a mistake. We're trying to correct.
So the great majority of states have either no constitutional mission in process,
or if they have one, it's much more than fifty percent. But democracy's
on the ballot. It's one man, one vote, no other ones.
If you're stupid, if you're really stupid, vote with Planned Parenthood, which
is you know, well, yeah, yeah, if you're really stupid,
you're going to vote with Planned parenthood. If you're really stupid, you're gonna
believe this new bill is all about shutting down the skirt game. So they're
counting on a gullible public to believe the breathless news stories that are rarely grounded
in any facts whatsoever, written and spoken just to gin up a fury over
nothing. And you know, I'm not even the main sponsor of this bill,
but I'm telling you, as a lawyer of over forty years standing,
been in the best lawyers in America for fifteen or more years, I'm telling
you I've done my homework, and the bill we're talking about is in no
way, shape or form anywhere near what is being breathlessly reported. And so
my friends who dress up for the skirt game can go about their business free,
clear and unencumbered. Unworried by what happens when this bill passes, they'll
still be able to have their funding games over there at Delhide Park. So
if the skirt game begins, topless start having failing symbols running around the basis,
if they're gyrating and public halfmaking, if there's kids present, that would
be different. They might have a problem. It would be different. But
that's not the third game that I've witnessed. It's it's just a bunch of
guys with mustaches and beards, dressed in dresses that are more befitting for your
grandma. And it's funny, and they have still fitting wigs on, and
and it's a it's it's meant to be a parody and a fun thing,
and it is a fun thing. So nobody is trying to shut that down
no way, shape or form. See, reality is not a news story,
though, isn't. I guess not. It's it's it's really enough to
make you shake your head about what happened to real journalism in the United States.
Well, thank god John Legend has come to town to talk about the
constitutional issues relative to State Issue one. I'm glad John Legend appeared and that
that dumb ass. I mean, it's unbelievable. People lap this up like
a cat with milk, and I guess we get We get the government we
deserve, we get the news media we deserve, and that worries me.
Well, you know, I'm a believer in the idea that we elect elected
representatives to the House and the Senate and the governor, and we will determine
what are the appropriate laws, and if you don't like it, you can
vote us out. That is the way the republic was set up. We
never intended to have all this so called direct democracy. Some would call it
mobocracy because the public lacks the ability to really comprehend some of the finer ins
and outs of constitutional and statutory law, and they'll be swayed by multimillion dollar
ad campaigns. And I'll be the first to admit there's plenty of hyperbole on
both sides of issue one, but I'm just giving you the fact. Thirty
two states don't allow this at all. A substantial number of the renting states
have supermajority requirements. Constitution should not be easy to amend. It requires a
lot of sober deliberation before you decide to mess with your founding document, Bill
Sites, you're making too much sense to make news. Well, all we
can do is try Bill and put it out there for good people like you
that are willing to entertain a dispassionate, sober view of the situation. Bill
Sites, the truth will set us all free. So many are enslaved.
Maybe, Bill Sites, thank you for setting the record straight this afternoon on
the back Cunningham Show. Thank you, Bill, good deal, Thanks Bill,
yeahye. That will not make the news. Two twenty seven, Bill
Cunningham News Radio seven hundred WLW The Reads take on the Arizona Diamondbacks in a
three game series July twenty first through the twenty third on Saturday July twenty second, Fans twenty