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There is a gathering, and very significant, storm growing on social media to rename the town of Woking, and to change its name back to its Anglo-Saxon form of Wohingas. Superficially, this battle has erupted because the towns name has the term Woke in it. More significantly, however, the row points to greater themes at play within Western society, the media and the culture wars. April is the cruellest month and on such a significant day as today, it would be foolish indeed to ignore the threat faced by Woking.

When you look up the cultural contribution of Woking, it packs a surprisingly large punch for a town which is a byword for the London commuter belt. For example, H.G. Wells set Horsell Common in Woking for the Martians first landing in War of the Worlds. Now cultural fact is stranger than science fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle lands Sherlock Holmes in the town for an investigation in one of his short stories. More recently Woking was compared to Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for by Douglas Adams in The Deeper Meaning of Liff. In February 1982 The Jam reached number 1 in the charts by writing A Town Called Malice about Woking. A town called malice aforethought, indeed.

So perhaps Woking is overdue a bit of the limelight. Now, though, it is caught in the glare of cultural conflagration.

Dig a bit deeper into the political make-up of Woking and the place turns out to be fertile ground for a culture war. The town has a Liberal Democrat Mayor, but a Conservative MP. The Torys have 20 seats in the council while the Liberals have 18. In the last General Election, the long-standing Conservative MP was returned to Westminster, but lost 5.2 percent of his vote while the Liberal Democrat candidate increased vote by a staggering 13.2 percent.

The Tories need culture wars in places like Woking to hold onto power in the Southeast, while pork-barrelling money into the Red Wall. These sorts of conflicts dont do the Lib Dems any harm either; getting them much-needed attention and manufactured relevance for the community they should be serving.

To really understand how Woking could be caught up in a wave of Anglo-Saxon reactionary rage, look no further than the Brexit referendum of 2016. Traditionally the town was the very definition of true blue, but voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union (51.2 percent). Up until the Brexit referendum this was a town which oozed middle class stability, but is now ripping itself apart over what it should call itself.

The Brexit debate polarised everything it touched. To understand this, we must get to grips with the figure of Nigel Farage, who looms so large in the leafy suburbs such as Woking. His personality, more than anyone else in modern political culture, polarised every tacit of British life. Brexit was his Pandoras Box, which lit the tinder chest of culture wars, creating an earthquake to shake the very foundations of what it is to live in a town like Woking. From this spouted the fountainhead of polarisation to create the divided society we live in today. For Brexit, read controversy over trans, BLM, lockdown, anti-vaxers, the BBC, climate change or indeed the woking classes.

Society is now so divided that we cant even agree on names of the places we live in. The Woking controversy is evidence of a collective collapse in Western culture. No wonder Putin is so emboldened. Just imagine what his trolls and bots could do with this war of the worlds: Woking versus Wohingas.

All of this is deeply problematic and goes to the root of who we are and where we want to go. Unless we can rely on what our communities call themselves, how can we avoid a return to Anglo-Saxon attitudes? Not much can be expected from our political overlords. Boris the Deceiver Johnson and Sir Keir Captain Hindsight Starmer are hardly the people to take us forward, but make us look back into an abyss of culture wars constructed for their own ends. With such medieval jesters and knights of the realm in charge, what hope for Woking? As Shakespeare has his fool, Feste, tell Malvolio in Twelfth Night: Then you are mad indeed, if you are no better in your wits than a fool.

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The culture war fight to rename Woking - TheArticle

It is not clear if a 25-year-old postal employee named William Cuthbert Faulkner was among the readers who accepted the literary challenge thrown down 100 years ago, in the spring of 1922, when James Joyce released his avant-garde epic, Ulysses. What we do know is that Faulkners Southern twist on Joycean modernism has made for popular reading in the wake of the U.S. Capitol insurrection and other spasms of red-state rage.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als declared that Faulkner foresaw the age of Trump and Derek Chauvins trial, and the Gordian knot of race that continues to choke large portions of our country. Michael Gorra, in his recent book The Saddest Words: William Faulkners Civil War, added that while Faulkners early readers saw a quarrel in his work between...the Old South and the New, this now seems like pocket change, and the story he offers instead is that of the nation itself.

In a day and age when Confederate monuments are falling and the author of a best-seller called Hillbilly Elegy is running for Senate, Faulkner is unquestionably relevant. But the fog of our culture wars may be so thick and hazy that we also need some Joycean fireworks to guide us through the Faulknerian backwoods.

For all their differences, Faulkners Yoknapatawphans and Joyces urban Catholics and Jews actually share quite a few traits. They all live in the tall shadows of gunmenhaunted by historical ghosts of rebellion and war, steeped in cultures prone to romanticization. For many characters in both Faulkner and Joyce, history is a nightmare from which they cannot awaken. And their social orders are dominant in some ways but subjugated in others, jumbling our conventional understandings of oppression and dominance, even of resistance.

A revolution must come on the due instalments plan, Joyces wandering Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom declares late in Ulysses. It is an ironic statement in an ironic scene, in a novel that often treats oppression, nationalism and political violence in deeply ironic ways. There are cultural lessons in such passages as timely and valuable as anything in Faulkner.

Upon its release, Ulysses dazzled and confounded readers with its kaleidoscopic array of political, sexual and intellectual escapades, unfolding on a single fictional dayhenceforth to be known as Bloomsday. Often forgotten is that on the actual Bloomsday, June 16, 1922, Irelands revolutionary movementa prominent presence in Ulysseswas decisively split in two when voters approved the terms of a contentious Anglo-Irish peace treaty.

By then, Irelands nationalist movement had been supporting political candidates under the banner of Sinn Fein, while simultaneously waging guerilla warfare against British colonial forces.

Oft-mentioned throughout Ulysses is a shadowy nationalist group called the Invincibles, which murdered Lord Frederick Cavendish in Dublins Phoenix Park in 1882. Sinn Feiners would later claim the assassination was justified by recurrent British atrocities. It was as if the English felt themselves absolved from all ethical restraints when dealing with the Irish, Julie Kavanagh writes in her 2021 book The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England.

Joyces alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, even has gruesome visions of the behung...corpses of papishes as he reflects upon the close, complicated ties between Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church. May the God above/ Send down a dove/ With teeth as sharp as razors/ To slit the throats/ Of the English dogs/ That hanged our Irish leaders, Joyces rebel Citizen rhapsodizes at one point.

But Joyce also explores resistance to oppression in ways that might seem out of fashion today. With his huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, the Citizenand nationalism itselfis portrayed with heaping doses of irreverence. Scholars have noted that, in fashioning Ulysses after the Odyssey, Joyce links the Citizen with Homers one-eyed Cyclopsas in: a monstrous figure who doesnt see things very clearly.

Then there are the piteous lamentations over the grave and ghost of the uncrowned king of Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, whose towering memory is contrasted with the none-too-inspiring presence of his brother, John. Finally, Robert Emmets impassioned proclamations are also juxtaposed with Leopold Blooms uncontrollable flatulence.

At one point, the Citizen himself starts gassing, going on and on about the Invincibles and the old guard and the men of sixtyseven. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new dog so he ought. Mangy ravenous brute. Perhaps most unsettling, after confronting Bloom in a pub, the Citizen rants: Ill brain that bloody jewman, then shouts: Sinn Fein!Sinn Fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.

For Joyce, nationalism may have been a necessary response to oppression, but it is not without its own shortcomings. Exploring these does run the risk of undermining powerful goals of resistance and of being a loyal enemy of my enemy. Looked at another way, though, confronting the fallibilities of the persecuted or their allies might be the ultimate acknowledgement of their humanitya status never granted by oppressors.

The very year in which Ulysses is set, a Catholic priest named John Creagh brewed up an antisemitic furor in Ireland. Joycewho was in Paris as the Dreyfus Affair unfoldedreturned to Dublin just in time for[this] boycott of Jewish merchants in Limerick, Richard Ellman notes. The 1904 campaign was short-lived and laudably condemned by many Irish Catholicsbut not by Arthur Griffith, who was not only among Father Creaghs supporters, but founded Sinn Fein.

To ignore this about Griffith or the likes of John Creagh, simply because they also happen to have been aligned with the anti-Brits, would be absurd. So would labeling Stephen Dedalus some kind of quisling or traitor because of his lament that he is a servant not just of a single colonial ruler, but two masters, an English and an Italian. Would that more readers and writersthen and nowcould wrestle with this Italian churchs monumental flaws, but also its virtues; its historic protection of the persecuted, along with its persecutions.

Like the Citizen, too many culture warriorsthen and nowsee only friends or foes, useful idiots or scapegoats, in social conflict. Complicating things any further veers close to giving succor to the enemy.

Meanwhile, 100 years later, the party now bearing the name Sinn Fein has moved from the radical margins to the very center of political life in Ireland. The nationalists are well positioned to be the top vote-getters in the upcoming May 2022 assembly elections in Northern Ireland. In fact, Sinn Fein is also on the verge of becoming the ruling party down south in the Republic of Ireland.

In short, after a centurys worth of bloodshed and growing pains, the Irish nationalist revolution has made its way into the nations respectable ruling class.

As evidenced by the January 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, Yoknapatawpha Countys 21st-century offspringnationalist in their own wayare looking to take a different route to power. And William Faulkners relevance in 2022 seems indisputable.

To Carl Rollyson, the recent biographer of Faulkner, novels like The Sound and the Fury offer a stunning rebuke to a society built on segregation and on the ideology of white supremacy. The literary scholar Myka Tucker-Abramson notes that when a new cycle of wealth extraction...on the battlefields of real estate and oil beckoned in the United States, Donald Trump answered [the call], one whose blueprint and history Faulkners postwar fiction provides. The critic Philip Weinstein could just as easily be talking about the former president when he observes that Faulkners drifter-turned-magnate (and later, dynastic powerbroker) Flem Snopes is there to fan [chaos] into action and exploit its consequences.

Flem gets his comeuppance at the end of The Mansion (1957), the third and final book in Faulkners newly relevant Snopes trilogy. But Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! is also an illuminating MAGA surrogate. As a young boy, Sutpen famously tried to enter the opulent Pettibone mansion, only to be rebuffed by a Black servanta perfect storm of class and racial grievance that drives Sutpen for the remainder of his restless, maniacal life.

Sutpen himself meets a gruesome end with its own toxic blend of rage and poetic justice. Eventually even his beloved estate, Sutpen Hundred, is destroyed, torched by his traumatized biracial daughter.

More and more reactionaries, though, are also turning to language and actionsany means necessary, you might even saythat seem more Weathermen than Rotarian. How are we to combat this unlikely turn of events?

Too often, amid the shock and horror of the past five years, the progressive resistance has relied upon fighting strident, inflexible fire with its own strident and inflexible fire. There is a reluctance to scrutinize familiar ideas or allies or look inwardeven with Joycean irreverenceamid fears that such reflections might amount to punching down or being told that this is not a space for intellectualizing the topic, as Cambridge academics were warned during a recent workshop.

And so, rather than take an opportunity to distinguish between more and less urgent ideas, hone arguments or perhaps even develop new coalitions, there is faith that poetic justice is nigh, because we are on the right side of history and they are not. Thomas Sutpen, after all, was dispatched, even if the slam of that Pettibone mansion door continues to ring in many ears.

Flem Snopes, too, was consigned to the dustbin of Confederate historyby a relative, no less. Yet there are many other members of the extended Snopes clan. One might even call them a dynasty.

In another ironic twist, some thoughtful observers are now worried Yoknapatawphan rage might lead to Irish-style nationalist violence in the United States. While the United States obviously has not descended to the level of present-day Iraq or Lebanon or Troubles-era Northern Ireland, Jonathan Stevenson and Steven Simon wrote in The New York Review of Books last year, these are ominously suggestive examples. Efforts to confront armed, far-right militants with laws more clearly defining domestic terrorism and strengthening the means to combat it might only burnish their status as freedom fighters.

This, Stevenson and Simon argue, is what happened when the Provisional Irish Republican Army rose to prominence in Northern Ireland. They also worry about American militias attempting high-profile assassinations, while also whipping up populist fervor through strategically calculated hunger strikes...as the IRA did. All of which only made it easier for them to gain political traction as principled revolutionaries through Sinn Fein, their political counterpart.

At least in Ireland, it took decades for the nationalist rebels to make their way to the mainstream. There was, if you will, a due instalments plan. Here in the United States, it turns out the Q-Anoners were already in elected office and since 2016 have set about tracking the muck of the swampy margins all the way into the White House and onto the steps of the Capitol.

And can we not love our country then? one nationalist character wonders in Joyces first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is a question that hovers over much of Joyces and Faulkners work, and our own moment.

Such love can take many formsincluding, of course, hate. Which brings to mind a hunting trip in Faulkners second Snopes novel, The Town. A noise in some shrubbery compels one character to speculate that it might only be a rabbit, or it might be a bigger varmint, one with more poison or anyhow more teeth. And you can watch the bushes shaking but you cant see what it is or which a way its goingat least, not until it breaks out.

But by then it may be too late.

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In an age of insurrections and culture wars, Joyce and Faulkner are increasingly relevant - America Magazine

For the first time since 2018, the Academy Awards is returning to an emcee format in a bid to inject some humour into proceedings - with actress Regina Hall hosting this year alongside comedy veterans Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes.

Sky News caught up with Hall to talk Oscars and her new scary film Master, which is out now.

In it, she plays Gail Bishop, a university professor - or "master" - at an elite university, where horror and hauntings unfold against a backdrop of her struggles to navigate an all-white institution. Here's what she had to say...

Have you felt a lot of support since your name was announced as one of this year's Oscars hosts?

I think people are excited for hosts. I've watched it for the past couple of years without a host... it's great that it's back; it's crazy that I'm one of them, but it's exciting. And of course, my my co-hosts are wonderful and I love them so much, so I'm very excited to work with them.

Have you been working with a team of writers and is there a vague plan in place for who'll be saying what during the ceremony?

No, we just get together, get high and just go, 'let's just see where it's going to fall now! No, we have a great team of writers and they sit and we come and bounce ideas off each other. I think that's what's so great, it's so collaborative, and sometimes it's like, 'Oh, Amy, you'd be great for this', and Amy will email me or text or leave a voice note, the same with Wanda. Like, 'Oh, I read this, I thought it'd be great for Wanda'.

It's just been very collaborative, and that process has been really fun to get to know them but also, you know, the bigger thing is we're all rooting for each other on stage.

Tell us about your new film, Master, and do you think using the horror genre to illustrate racism is a particularly effective tool in terms of helping people to understand some of the issues?

Gail Bishop is the first black master at Ancaster College, which is an elite institution. It's a fictitious college, apparently better than Harvard, and it's kind of what happens that first semester as the first black master, she goes through a lot!

I certainly think that putting it in a genre where people may not see it coming allows people... it makes it a bit more digestible. You know, as opposed to feeling preached that they feel like they're kind of experiencing it because they're also experiencing like the discomfort of the world, you know. Like, oh my goodness, I hear the sound. Something's about to happen. So I think... it gets the palate prepared and I think it does make the subject matter a little bit more digestible.

Did any of your character's experiences of racism resonate?

I think racism is something you just experience constantly... it doesn't mean you experience it from every person, you know, I think that's what's interesting, the subtlety. Certain things, the intentions aren't racist, you know, even when [in the film] they're calling [my character] Beyonce. What could be a joke for one person can be a little more traumatic for the person who's on the receiving end.

So, of course, I've received, perceived or experienced racism but that's also just a part of being a black woman. It's like a woman is going to experience sexism at some point, you know, even if the intention is not there, it just is. And so that's what I liked about how [filmmaker Mariama Diallo] explored it, there wasn't necessarily anything intentionally dark about it, but that doesn't lessen the experience.

In the UK, following the Black Lives Matter marches we talk now about culture wars and there are debates ongoing about removing statues of slave owners and changing the names of institutions. Do you think it's a positive thing that these conversations are happening?

I think with social media it enables people to be able to see it who may not have experienced it, but once you can actually see it, you can see, 'Oh, wait, that was not right' and that starts a conversation. And then there are people who don't want to see it. That's just the reality of people who want to make those events isolated as opposed to being like, 'Well, what can we do?' It doesn't mean that that's intentionally horrible either, you know. Some people are very attached to their history, even if it's a negative one.

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Master is in cinemas and streaming on Amazon Prime. You can watch the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday 27 March exclusively on Sky Cinema from 11pm - and follow our live blog on the Sky News website and app. For those not wanting to stay up late, you can watch again on Monday 28 at 7pm on Sky Cinema or from 10pm on Sky Showcase

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Oscars 2022: Regina Hall on culture wars, funny women and tackling racism: Meet one of the hosts of this year's awards ceremony - Sky News

WASHINGTON Even as other European leaders rushed to support Ukraine in its effort to repel the invasion Russia launched in late February, Hungarys nationalist, authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbn, remained defiantly aloof, unwilling to sacrifice his long-standing relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the sake of a neighboring nation trying to assert its independence from Russia, as Hungary once had.

Like counterparts across the continent, Orbn had been subject to an impassioned appeal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Orbns case, Zelensky invoked Hungary's uprising against communism in 1956, which was ruthlessly suppressed by Moscow. There is no time to hesitate. Its time to decide, Zelensky told Orbn.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks from Kyiv by video to leaders of the European Council on March 24. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)

The man sometimes called Viktator which intentionally rhymes with dictator remained unmoved. Our moral responsibility is not for Ukraine: our moral responsibility is for our own people, he said in a radio interview last Sunday, pointing out that Hungary is heavily dependent on Russian energy.

He also drew a distinction with his liberal opponents, who he said were willing to sacrifice our interests on the altar of Ukrainian interests and do what the president of Ukraine says we should do.

Those liberal opponents hope to score a major victory in Sundays parliamentary election, which will serve as a referendum not only on Orbns self-described illiberal democracy a cousin of the managed democracy his friend Putin implemented in Russia but on the imperiled future of democracy in Eastern Europe.

In many ways, Hungary is a cautionary tale, David Koranyi, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a critic of the Orbn regime, told Yahoo News. He laments how, under Orbn, the promising, newly minted democracy of the 1990s has curdled into a repressive regime where, as in Russia, independent media outlets have been suppressed and democratic institutions bullied into submission.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn on Friday at the final electoral rally before Sunday's election. (Petr David Josek/AP)

Hungary under Orbn has also become something of a fixation with American conservatives; in January he received an endorsement from ally Donald Trump, who praised him as a strong leader.

Many on the right seem to admire Orbn for claiming victories in the same culture wars they have been waging for decades. Since returning to power in 2010 (he had previously served a single term as prime minister between 1998 and 2002), Orbn has pushed what he calls a pro-family agenda that is similar to the one supported by American evangelicals. He was also a staunch opponent of allowing migrants from Syria and North Africa into Hungary, and he built a border fence similar to the barrier Trump promised as a means of keeping migrants from Latin America out of the United States.

That earned Orbn a visit from Tucker Carlson in the summer of 2021. The Fox News host hosted a week of his primetime program from the capital city, Budapest, culminating in a one-on-one interview with Orbn. Hungary, Carlson told his American viewers, is a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.

Orbn fandom on the American right did have to do with his moves to ban abortion or same-sex marriage or otherwise curtail LGBTQ rights in Hungary, the journalist Sarah Posner, who has covered Hungarian politics, told the radio program "On Point" last year. They liked that. They also liked his appeals to not just ethnic nationalism but Christian nationalism, which is what they have been promoting here in the United States.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks during the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt in Hungary in 2021. (Janos Kummer/Getty Images)

Hungary is a starkly different cultural battleground from the United States. About 62% of Hungarians are Catholic today. The nations Jewish population, once large and thriving, was nearly eradicated in the final murderous months when the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was in operation during World War II, while Muslims have never been nearly as welcome in Hungary as they have been in Western European countries like Germany and the United Kingdom.

Opponents of Orbn hope the mutual admiration will be disrupted with Sundays election, which they hope will be the culmination of years of political organizing under highly inauspicious circumstances. Liberal and centrist opposition groups have united behind Peter Marki-Zay, a young mayor from a southern city near the Romanian border. Hungary borders seven countries in all, and it has historically served at different times as an imperial power and as a vassal. Today it is both a member of the European Union and an ally of Russia a weak link in the chain of NATO, as Koranyi put it.

Marki-Zay imagines a different future for Hungary, one more closely aligned with the West. Putin and Orban belong to this autocratic, repressive, poor and corrupt world. And we have to choose Europe, West, NATO, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, a very different world: the free world, he recently told the New York Times.

Hungary's joint opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, at a campaign event in Budapest on Tuesday. (Anna Szilagyi/AP)

The sad irony of the Hungarian oppositions increasing unity is that it is up against an authoritarian ruler as determined as ever to stay in power. Now that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stepped down, Orbn is the European Unions longest-serving head of state. Never especially shy about wielding state power to advance his own chance of reelection, he has recently gone so far as to use a coronavirus alert service to make a pitch ahead of Sundays election. Given the crosscurrents of fear and propaganda that mark Hungarian public discourse, Marki-Zays chances of victory are lower than they should be, Koranyi lamented.

Orbn has tried recently to edge away from Putin without alienating him, a tactic to spare Hungary from repercussions an embittered Kremlin could levy. The contrast is especially stark with Poland, where a nationalistic and conservative government has pivoted to support Ukraine. A similar move is highly unlikely to emanate from Budapest if Orbn remains in charge.

There are really alarming similarities between Putins Russia and Orbns Hungary, media scholar Eva Bognar of the Central European University in Hungary, told Yahoo News. The two countries are not identical, she cautioned, but the war in Ukraine could only bring the similarities into high relief. Orbn has been very proud of being friendly with Putin, Bognar said.

The special relationship between the two strongmen makes Sundays election a broader referendum on Hungarys future. Orbn really subordinated the country to Putin, Hungarian politician Katalin Cseh recently told former Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes on the Pod Save the World podcast. If Orbn stays in power, we will become the pariah of the EU for a very long time to come.

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Why Americans should care about the Hungarian election - Yahoo News

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An Ohio bill that would require public schools to provide age-appropriate child sexual abuse prevention instruction has been held up in an Ohio Senate committee, as a conservative Christian public policy group is pushing for changes that would emphasize abstinence before marriage, discourage transgender students from gender-affirming care, ban the simulation of sexual acts and the demonstration of contraception use during the lessons, among other propositions.

House Bill 105, also known as Erins Law, has been introduced five times in the Ohio General Assembly. This legislative session, the Ohio House passed the bill June 10 by a margin of 86-8.

The bill requires school districts, charter schools and science, technology, engineering and math or STEM schools to provide child sexual abuse prevention instruction for grades K-6.

For grades 7-12, schools would have to provide age-appropriate instruction in sexual violence prevention. Schools must also provide counseling and resources for students who have been victims of abuse and violence.

But the Center for Christian Virtue is wading into the bill and has circulated a proposed amendment with several changes to HB 105.

The proposed changes come at a time when a vocal contingency of parents do not trust their kids schools. They say they are concerned about liberal ideologies taught to their kids about the history of American racism, social-emotional learning and sex education. Critics say the new fears over indoctrination are invented and a ploy for the GOP to anger and mobilize voters ahead of the November midterm election.

Some of the groups suggestions are already in other parts of Ohio law, such as instruction that promotes sexual abstinence until marriage.

Erins Law is named after Erin Merryn, an Illinois woman who was abused by two people when she was a child. She suffered with confusion and shame for years, and struggled with self-injury, an eating disorder, depression and a suicide attempt as a result. Both men who abused her told her to not utter a word, she said.

I stayed silent because my only education was from these perpetrators, she said.

Realizing that children are taught what to do when a fire alarm goes off, but not what to do when theyre abused, she created Erins Law. Over 30 states have passed it. Ohio is a special place for Merryn, she said, since her husband is from the state. She said she wants it passed but does not agree with some of the ideas the Center for Christian Virtue have for her bill.

This bill will get passed and I will make sure of it, she said. I dont want these changes. They are being unrealistic and putting all this fear that Erins Law addresses all these other issues it doesnt. It teaches personal body safety, so they need to quit interrupting the process and let the bill pass.

Erins Law is now in the Ohio Senate Primary and Secondary Education Committee. Bill sponsor Rep. Scott Lipps, a Dayton-area Republican, said he believes there are the votes in the committee to advance the bill to the Senate floor. But its being held up, he said.

Committee Chair Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican, hasnt held a hearing on the bill since Oct. 5. He wants the sponsors and the Center for Christian Virtue to negotiate a compromise.

Among the provisions in the Center for Christian Virtues amendment:

- The bill should stress that students should abstain from sexual activity until after marriage.

- That age-appropriate instruction means no visuals showing couples in sexual situations, children shouldnt role play scenarios or sexual conversations in the K-6 instruction

- That there be no instruction about consent for grades 7-12.

- No instruction shall imply that healthy relationships for minor children may include consensual sexual activity.

- Contraception use cannot be demonstrated.

- No instruction shall incorporate materials from groups advocating abortion, marketing contraceptives or cross-sex hormones, or those advocating or condoning sexual behavior among minor children.

- No instruction should advise that any information be withheld from parents, or imply that parents are untrustworthy, or in any way undermine the parent/ child relationship or the primary role of the family. Very few parents are guilty of sexual abuse of children, and to imply in any way that information should be concealed from most or all parents is unjust and deeply harmful to children and the family relationship.

- No teachers/staff may encourage students to join school-based groups that advocate teen sexual identities and behaviors.

For Lipps and Rep. Brigid Kelly, a Cincinnati Democrat who is also sponsoring the bill, the changes are unacceptable and steer away from the original purpose of Erins Law.

Its really about trying to prevent kids from being victims, from having to live through a life of trauma, Kelly said.

Lipps and Kelly recently agreed to a compromise in which parents can choose to opt their children out of receiving the instruction, which is another suggestion from the Center for Christian Virtue expected to soon be amended into the bill. But beyond that, the sponsors arent interested in the other provisions the group wants.

Brenner, the chairman of the Senate committee, said in addition to the Center for Christian Virtue, Ohio Value Voters also have concerns with the bill.

Theyre concerned that it is leading to sex ed and promoting a social agenda, Brenner said. ... There is so much distrust among a large chunk of the electorate over what is going on on these matters in schools -- with the issues around identity, you know students identity. Theyre concerned that things are going to be taught or promoted that are not along the lines of Erins Law.

Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, said the amendment in part attempts to prevent Planned Parenthoods curriculum from making its way into Ohio schools, although Planned Parenthood has not provided testimony on the bill and hasnt been involved in the drafting of HB 105.

The Center for Christian Virtue doesnt agree with Planned Parenthoods stances on abortion and gender-affirming care for transgender kids.

Its all of these things that we have concerns with that parents dont want to have in their classroom. And so were saying, Look, if you want to do sexual violence prevention education, OK. Lets see what it is. Show us what it is. And then people can go along with that, Baer said.

Aileen Day, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio said that the organization has no specific curricula for sexual violence prevention. It has a number of sex education programs, depending on the audience, that include discussions about the age of consent, identifying healthy and unhealthy relationships, communication with parents and other topics that are interconnected with sexual abuse and violence prevention.

Baer said that his organization wants to continue to work with Lipps and Kelly on the bill to make sure parents arent locked out of this equation, and children arent being pushed into more risky behaviors. Then well be in great shape.

Ohios existing sex education law is clear: When schools provide instruction in venereal disease prevention, they shall emphasize that abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is one hundred per cent effective against unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and the sexual transmission of a virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

So why is it necessary to repeat the abstinence requirement in Erins Law, which isnt about sex ed but sexual abuse and violence?

Baer said that its to prevent schools or curriculum from veering too far off course. He also notes that having a bullet point in the law emphasizing abstinence doesnt mean that teachers have to literally tell children they need to refrain from sex outside of marriage in the same breath as explaining good touch versus bad touch.

But with all laws, the devil is in the details, and instruction will depend on how the law is interpreted.

Theres a potential that if a child hears about the abstinence requirement during sexual abuse prevention education, they may blame themselves for abuse that has happened to them, which could cause shame and a slew of psychological harm that could last decades, said Erin Ostling Burkholder, director of outreach and prevention for Crime Victim Services.

Her organization offers 10 different programs in Allen and Putnam counties in the west-central part of the state, including rape crisis, child advocacy and violence prevention. It favors the bill in its original form, she said.

I think we can still teach an abstinence-only sexual education, curriculum and have a sexual violence, sexual abuse prevention curriculum, Ostling Burkholder said. Sexual abuse and sex are not the same thing. Rape and sex are completely different. And so to try to say that they are the same or to talk about them in the same way is very harmful. And I think its very confusing and misleading, particularly for children.

Merryn, who created Erins Law, said that she supported the Center for Christian Virtues position that parents deserve an opt-out from the instruction if they so choose. Several other states have that. But she doesnt support the groups other propositions as they might weaken the effectiveness of the legislation, she said.

In discussions with the Center for Christian Virtue, Merryn said that her website contains a list of age-appropriate sexual abuse and sexual violence prevention curriculum used in the other states that have Erins Law. Examples include Kid Power, a curriculum that also includes bullying prevention, abduction and other violence, and Darkness to Light: End Child Sexual Abuse, which trains adults in prevention so they can take it to their communities.

Ninety-percent of sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone a child knows -- a family member, faith leader, coach or others, said Dr. Tracy Najera, executive director of the Childrens Defense Fund of Ohio. Its important for children to know they deserve bodily privacy and what is appropriate touch. As a child gets into middle and high school they need to learn about sexual violence.

There are curriculum out there that are age-appropriate, posted on websites for school administrators, for teachers, for parents, for community members to take a look and see whats being taught, so theres nothing off or weird or would make parents take pause, she said.

Najera found the Christian organizations position puzzling, she said.

This is not the time and place for these types of cultural wars, she said. Theres so many stories in the last couple of years of someone who is a teacher or a coach, or someone who is trusted, violating a child. And this goes on for years, and the child is suffering. And then when the child is asked, Why didnt you tell anyone? They say, I didnt think anyone would believe me.

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Culture wars may sink bill in Ohio General Assembly on child sexual abuse prevention instruction - cleveland.com