ProgressOhio

Since announcing Dancers for Democracy, the women have appeared on radio and TV stations, including Bill Cunningham's show on WLW radio in Cincinnati and on WTAM in Cleveland.

On Friday afternoon, two dancers will join Cleveland club owner Frank Spencer  on  Mike Trivisonno's popular call-in show, also on WTAM.  

Their story has been broadcast over TV stations in Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, and Columbus and carried by ONN statewide.

View ONN Video: 

A Google Search will provide you with the scope of stories that have been run on the Dancers, but here is one of my favorites:

Mary McCarty: First Amendment should protect strippers
By Mary McCarty
Staff Writer
Dayton Daily News
Thursday, May 03, 2007

There would seem to be no sympathetic protagonists in any contest that pits Ohio's arbiter of public morals, Phil Burress, against strip-club owner Luke Liakos and his ilk.

I would like to live in a world in which there wasn't a market for the likes of Diamonds Cabaret.

I would like to live in a world in which Burress — author of Ohio's gay-marriage ban — didn't peddle prejudice in the name of piety.

So at first I couldn't get too worked up about Senate Bill 16, which would enforce a six-foot buffer between exotic dancers and their customers. It was a true eye-opener to attend Tuesday's press conference in Columbus, sponsored by the nonprofit civil-liberties group Progress Ohio.

Here, at last, were the sympathetic figures: the dancers themselves, not to mention their articulate defense of their free-speech rights. "With this bill I could not talk to my customers even if I were wearing a burqa," said Charity Fickisen, 23, of Columbus. "I could not talk to a customer even if that customer happened to be my husband."

Set aside your feelings about strip clubs and ask yourselves: How is this not a violation of free speech? Not to mention a colossal waste of our legislators' time in a state that has so many other pressing issues.

Record home mortgage foreclosures, tens of thousands of lost manufacturing jobs, college tuition 47 percent above national average — and lawmakers are fast-tracking a bill on strip clubs? It shouldn't just be the dancers calling on lawmakers to snap out of it.

But here were the dancers, crying babies on hips, wearing pink T-shirts with the slogan "Dancers for Democracy." Others came dressed in business casual, simple black blouses with a string of pearls — and they spoke with a self-assurance that would have done any boardroom proud. "If I violated the six-foot rule, I could be fined $1,000 or sentenced to six months in prison — the same as if I were convicted of assault, menacing by stalking or even negligent homicide," Fickisen said.

Brian Rothenberg, executive director of Progress Ohio, lambasted Burress, who has publicly stated that he began his crusade because he is a recovering porn addict. "Why should one man's porn addiction affect so many Ohioans, when all he has to do is say no and leave the rest of us alone?" Rothenberg asked.

It shouldn't be a news flash that many of the dancers are students, mothers and wives. Amber Layman moved to the Dayton area from Fort Wayne, Ind., four years ago to take a job at Diamonds Cabaret, where she earns $2,000 a week working 25 hours. If the law passes, she said, she'll have to travel to nearby states to earn a comparable income, spending less time with son Nijah, 4, and daughter Olivia, 1. "I'm 27 years old, and you can't dance forever," she said. "But for now there's no other job where I could make this kind of money working 25 hours a week."

She's right, and there's a big part of me that feels very sad about that. This is not an industry in which I would want my daughters to work.

But that's Layman's decision, not mine. And it certainly shouldn't be Phil Burress'.

That puts me in the uncomfortable position of siding with the strip-club owners. But let's look at it another way: I'm taking the side of the First Amendment.

Now, that's what you'd call a sympathetic cause.