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Ohio lawmakers have failed, at least for now, to pass a bill that would exert control over discussion of controversial beliefs about climate policies in college classrooms.

Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Republican, said this week that the bill doesnt have enough support to pass the House, where it has sat for months following passage in the Senate.

Senate Bill 83 contains a wide-ranging set of rules for public colleges and universities, including bans on most diversity training and new requirements that alternative viewpoints on such topics as climate policies, immigration and abortion are discussed. Its main sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Republican, said he was taking on the woke fiefdom of higher education.

The bill faced intense opposition from faculty, students, environmental groups and unions, leading to hours-long hearings over several months. Supporters of the bill made many changes to attempt to find a version that could pass, including the removal of language that banned strikes by higher education unions, but it wasnt enough.

A provision dealing with controversial beliefs or policies remained in the bill, which helped to inspire resistance from people who teach and study science; they warned that Ohios public colleges and universities would be impaired in their ability to teach climate science.

So many people have come out against this bill and have pushed back and have rallied, not only against this bill, but so much other harmful legislation, that I think its given me hope, said Keely Fisher, a Ph.D. student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University.

She spoke to Inside Climate News in May about how the bill made her wonder if she belonged in Ohio. Now she feels pride in the way her faculty and classmates and those at other universities defended their ability to do research unfettered by this regulation, she said.

Ohio Rep. Casey Weinstein, a Democrat, said he is not surprised to see the bill has failed to pass based on his conversations with Republican colleagues who were uncomfortable with various parts of it. Republicans hold large majorities in both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly.

In Ohio, we love our universities, so the fact that theyre attacking and potentially striking blows against our beloved public universities that are so critical to our workforce and our economy, that was a tough hill to climb, he said.

Cirino, the lead sponsor, testified before a House committee in May and faced questions from Weinstein, who asked how the measure would affect the teaching of the Holocaust. While Cirino didnt endorse inaccurate views of how the Holocaust should be taught, Weinstein said he is troubled that the bill seems to open the door to treating Holocaust denial as just another point of view.

I dont think he did himself any favors by, unfortunately, being honest about his bill and saying that he was trying to both sides slavery, 9-11 and the Holocaust, Weinstein said.

Cirino did not respond to a request for an interview.

The bill says faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.

The bill then lists examples of controversial topics, including climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.

A previous version of the bill referred to climate change instead of climate policies. Cirino changed it in response to concerns that the measure would regulate the teaching of climate science, but opponents said the bill would continue to impair teaching about climate change even with the new wording.

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Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, has been monitoring the Ohio legislation and is pleased to see that it doesnt appear likely to pass. His organization, based in California, opposes threats to the accuracy of science education in K-12 schools and higher education.

The Ohio bill is trying to sweep up higher education into the culture wars that Cirino and his supporters want to pursue, he said. Climate change is a fairly minor battlefield for them in the culture wars, but it is, indeed, part of what they want to fight about.

He said attacks on science education at public universities are much less common than what he sees happening in K-12 schools.

For example, his organization has been working to oppose efforts before the Texas State Board of Education to restrict the use of textbooks that accurately describe climate change and evolution.

Branch said the Ohio bill was so brazen and it offended so many interest groups, including labor unions, people of color and science educators, that it was not difficult to defeat. Other threats to science education are harder to fight.

But policy ideas can always come back in new forms, so there remains a possibility that Cirino or some other Ohio lawmaker could pursue aspects of this bill again. Senate President Matt Huffman, whose chamber passed the bill in the spring and still supports it, said this week that he will continue to push for the measure.

If that happens the coalition that opposed it will be ready to respond.

Fisher, the Ohio State student, said she welcomes not having to worry about the legislation for a while.

It is this weight off my shoulders that I didnt know I needed, she said.

Dan Gearino covers the midwestern United States, part of ICNs National Environment Reporting Network. His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICNs Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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Ohio Fails to Pass Restrictions on College Teaching About Climate ... - InsideClimate News

But in other important ways, OConnor eschewed a facile ideological template that would lend itself to easy forecasting. For her critics, her approach to the law could seem erratic and unpredictable. For those looking more closely, however, her decisions and her reasoning demonstrated a constant attention to the proper role of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan arbiter of hot-button issues in American life, to the actual facts about the actual parties, and to the way in which the benchs rulings would be experienced by the American public.

Hers was a humane, pragmatic jurisprudence qualities that are too often lacking in todays Supreme Court. These values were embodied in her approach not just to high-salience issues such as abortion, but also in somewhat less noticed disputes about the Fourth Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Its a legacy worth spotlighting.

Inevitably, the decision that will be most recalled today is the plurality opinion OConnor penned along with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In Casey, the Republican-appointed judges decided not to use their sheer force of numbers to overrule Roe v. Wade, and it stands in stark contrast to the work of President Donald Trumps three appointees in Dobbs v. Jacksonville Womens Health.

Casey matters not only because of its effect on reproductive freedoms, but for what it says about how the justices choose either to sustain or undermine the rule of law. OConnor understood how important it was that citizens didnt perceive their rights to turn on the impenetrable uncertainties of who got elected, who died, who resigned, and who could get through the Senate.

OConnor explained why she would not just vote her own politics in the (much maligned) first line of her Casey opinion: Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Here, she echoes thinking about the rule of law going back to Aristotle. Simply put, a legal system diminishes liberty by the sheer fact of being unpredictably open to the whims of particular officials. OConnor would later go on to champion the rule of law, but her insight into how the court must behave if legality is to be preserved is most powerfully on display in Casey.

At the same time, OConnor was capable of profound empathy for the actual litigants before the court. Consider a little-noticed case that, in practice, deeply shapes Americans experience with police. Atwater v. City of Lago Vista asked whether a police officer could spitefully take advantage of a minor traffic misdemeanor (failure to wear a seat belt) to arrest a woman, separating her from her minor children. The court said yes, over a vigorous dissent by OConnor.

Atwater is one of those minor cases that, on the ground, is incredibly consequential: It surely matters to many people whether they can be locked up because they fail to use their seat belt. The courts ruling gave police a startling and destabilizing new power over citizens. OConnors eloquent and passionate dissent captured the far-reaching way in which the courts ruling shook the life not just of Gail Atwater but of millions of Americans on the road.

Finally, when it came to the First Amendments Establishment Clause and the separation of church and state, OConnor was no less sensitive to peoples direct experiences with the law. In her view, the government violated religious neutrality by taking sides improperly in the religion-inflected culture wars if an objective observer would perceive a state endorsement of faith.

Here, OConnor took seriously the idea that government favoritism between religions, and between the devout and the secular, can be destabilizing. She understood the potential for people to feel stigmatized and excluded by such religious partisanship. And her approach to the law centered those concerns by literally demanding that judges take the perspective of the citizen facing a seemingly biased state.

The strategy of the Roberts Court, however, has been strikingly different. There is no case during the Roberts Court in which the Establishment Clause has provided the necessary basis for invalidating a government practice. Rejecting claims under the Clause, the Roberts Court has also played fast and loose with facts in ways that would have seemed quite alien to OConnor. The overall effect, a leading scholar of the First Amendment recently wrote, is that the court is disestablishing that part of the First Amendment making it, in effect, a second-class right.

There is, of course, much in OConnors record with which a person on the left or the right will disagree: Thats perhaps the inevitable result of being open to the facts of each new case, and empathetic to the experiences of their litigants. Yet if unpredictability is the cost for such fidelity to law and seriousness about justice, its hard to see why the price is not worth paying.

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What Sandra Day O'Connor Could Teach Today's Supreme Court - POLITICO

There is nothing new under the sun. So goes the adage which conveys the tendency for history to repeat itself.

Its this unstated premise that drives Kliph Nesteroffs latest book, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars. In it, Nesteroff artfully seeks to demonstrate how current catchphrases like cancel culture and political correctness are just variations of the same generational and ideological divides which have undergirded American society throughout Hollywoods history.

Nesteroff turns his attention to comedians in particular, citing the ways in which they have historically been unique targets of the culture wars.

His arguments are cogent and his histories entertaining how is it possible that vaguely defined spirit of the times is not a quote about wokeness, but instead a denunciation of critiques levied on comedians more than half a century ago?

Still, its worth noting that Nesteroff began his career as a comedian, which perhaps betrays an inherent sympathy for the prophetic martyrs who have frequently been subjected to unjust censorship and criticism throughout the history of showbiz.

___

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Book Review: 'Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars' argues history repeats itself - AOL

THE ISSUE

If activist groups from the religious right have their way, Scholastic Book Fairs in Lancaster County and beyond may soon be replaced by a new Texas-based vendor called SkyTree Book Fairs that distributes pro-God, pro-America childrens books, LNP | LancasterOnlines Brett Sholtis reported last Sunday. In the past year, Scholastic has come under fire from some religious conservatives after agreeing to keep books about Black civil rights icons and LGBTQ+ characters in its elementary school collection.

If you want to ban Scholastic Book Fairs from schools, why not also ban recess and classroom parties and everything else that adds joy to childrens school lives?

Attending a Scholastic Book Fair with some crumpled dollar bills and parental instructions not to spend the money on scented erasers and kitten posters has been a treasured rite of American childhood for decades. Generations of children learned to love reading while turning the pages of books they discovered among the diverse offerings at their schools book fair.

Well, sorry, kids you may have to bid farewell to Pete the Cat and Junie B. Jones and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Instead, meet a gorilla named Bongo, a character in the 2021 book Paws Off My Cannon, by former National Rifle Association spokesperson and conservative TV host Dana Loesch. Emphasizing the importance of the Second Amendment, this book will make perfect reading material for your child as he or she hides in a classroom closet during a lockdown drill.

Then theres Lucas the lion cub, the main character in The Test of Lionhood, in which Lucas sister is poisoned and Lucas has to save the day. The book is meant to teach about the importance of masculinity and, presumably, about the helplessness of girls. Its author, Kevin Sorbo, is an actor who claims he was canceled by Hollywood for his conservative Christian beliefs which seems kind of whiny and weak from a guy who used to play Hercules.

And who needs The Baby-Sitters Club when your child can read The Night The Snow Monster Attacked, a book purportedly about good leadership penned by former U.S. Army Gen. Mike Flynn? Flynn was such an excellent leader that he urged then-President Donald Trump to declare martial law and deploy the military so Trump could get a mulligan on the 2020 presidential election. Never mind the U.S. Constitution, kids Flynn says that can be suspended to steal elections from their rightful winners because, leadership!

And heres the best part: The list price of each of these literary delights is $22.99 each.

Wed like to think that replacing a vast array of affordable books that children actually want to read with $23 books peddling right-wing propaganda will never happen. But never say never, especially when right-wing activists have been so effective in scaring parents about our changing world that once-reasonable politicians like state Sen. Ryan Aument now are pandering to those trumped-up fears.

And, as Sholtis pointed out, while the right-wing extremist group Moms for Liberty largely failed in its mission to help hard-right candidates get elected to school boards in other parts of Pennsylvania, their favored candidates have won control in multiple Lancaster County school districts, including Warwick School District.

Sholtis reported that Rachel Wilson-Snyder, chair of the Lancaster County chapter of Moms for Liberty, recently shared a link to SkyTrees website on the chapters private Facebook group. And Wilson-Snyder exhorted other parents to host a SkyTree book fair at their childrens schools. Bye Scholastic! she quipped.

As Sholtis noted, in places like Warwick School District, where Wilson-Snyder has been a vocal presence at public meetings, replacing Scholastic with SkyTree is a real possibility.

The trick is getting the school districts on board with switching from Scholastic to SkyTree, one member of the local Moms for Liberty Facebook group offered.

SkyTree takes its name from a book written by Kirk Cameron, who played a teenage character in the popular sitcom Growing Pains in the 1980s and early 90s and now is a Christian evangelist. Cameron has voiced virulently anti-LGBTQ+ views, so its perhaps not surprising that he released his second childrens book, Pride Comes Before the Fall, on June 1 the first day of Pride month.

Cameron has been cheerleading SkyTree on conservative media. Its benign name is belied by its agenda.

As Sholtis reported, a close look at SkyTree reveals it is a distribution channel for Brave Books, a publishing house that has faced ridicule and criticism for its bench of authors almost entirely composed of prominent conservative media figures.

On its website, Brave Books contends that its titles will serve as armor in the battle against an enemy that is firing arrows at the hearts and minds of your kids.

It continues: Cultural forces are hard at work attempting to steal the hearts and minds of your most prized possession, your children. This enemy would love nothing more than to leave your family weak, your children confused, and their value system destroyed.

We found these assertions mystifying. Who is the enemy trying to weaken families, confuse children and destroy family values? Scholastic stalwarts like Clifford the Big Red Dog? (Hes red, the color of the Communist Party of China flag, after all.) Pinkalicious, the little girl who ate so many pink cupcakes that her hair and skin turned pink? Is Pinkalicious working with the singer Pink, the pop musician who recently gave away 2,000 challenged books to audience members at her concerts in Florida? Is there something nefarious about Peppa Pig or Pig the Pug or Fly Guy?

Please, parents, let your kids be kids. Let them discover the joys of reading without seeking to indoctrinate them. If you dont want your kids to buy particular books at a school book fair, talk to them and suggest titles youre comfortable with the Scholastic website is very parent-friendly. You can plug in your childs age and grade level to find appropriate books. But dont try to keep books from other parents children. And remember: More often than not, a big red dog is just a big red dog.

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As the culture wars shift to school book fairs, please protect kids' joy ... - LNP | LancasterOnline

Regarding "Conservative issues stall after backlash in St. Charles County" (Nov. 16): While several high-profile conservative political efforts in St. Charles County have indeed stalled, opponents say they're gearing up for the next round in this epicenter of the culture wars.

There is no mistaking these boilerplate efforts are not confined to Missouri. Look no further than Collinsville, Illinois. The same conservative hair-on-fire blueprint was successfully weaponized during last year's consolidated election, replacing the Mississippi Valley Library Board (MVLB) with trustees and president of the Collinsville system with far-right candidates.

The MVLB President, Jeanne Lomax, proudly displayed her passion for extreme viewpoints while attending the Jan. 6, 2021, D.C. rally that became the insurrection at the Capitol. As board president, she removed rainbow bookmarks that were part of a "Libraries Transform" campaign.

This conservative majority among board members is currently engaged in effort to reduce the MVLB tax levy, cutting library finding. Citizens and elected officials working together, strengthening our institutions, shouldn't be a lost concept, even in our current divisive environment, but the momentum continues. National polls reveal Americans are tired of the circus-like atmosphere in politics.

Schools and libraries have a way of bringing communities and organizations together, engaging people who may have little common interests. We all want what is best for our schools, children, seniors, and the entire community. Libraries shouldn't be used as tools to advance a political agenda,diminishing their value and making them unwelcoming.

Doug MayCollinsville

NBC reports that Alabama's public library system flagged a children's book as being "potentially explicit" due to the author's last name being "Gay".

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Letter: Let's keep public libraries out of the right-wing culture wars - St. Louis Post-Dispatch