COLUMBUS – An effort by strip-club owners to get a referendum on next week’s ballot loosening new restrictions on adult businesses has been rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court. This comes after a petition attempt to fight the anti-adult law from going into effect last month also failed. Vote No on Issue 1 Committee, the group fighting the strip-club law, failed to gather the required number of signatures from at least 44 of the 88 Ohio counties.
"The most dissapointing thing about this is that our polling showed we had a hell of a chance to win this fight," free speech activist Sandy Theis told AVN. "The people were really with us here...they wanted to show the politicians that they should be dealing with the important issues at hand. The next great battle in this fight will be in Cleveland in the federal courts."
Theis said that the group will now challenge the Constitutionality of the anti-adult law.
The group had to collect just over 241,000 signatures of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election, and at least 3% of those signatures had to be from voters in each of 44 of Ohio's 88 counties. All of the votes have not yet been tallied, but so far the group has submitted sufficient names in just 15 counties.
According to a report in the Ohio Dispatch, the court refused to force Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to act to put the issue on the ballot because of alleged improprieties in how the signatures were handled.
The court challenge briefly delayed the anti-adult law from going into effect. The bill prohibits nude or semi-nude performing between midnight and 6 a.m. and require that a distance of six feet be maintained between dancers and customers at all times – even when the dancers are fully dressed.
The Vote No on Issue 1 Committee was given an additional ten days after the group initially fell short 116,000 signatures in September.
