Cleveland Reporter

A Shaker Heights-based group of "suburban wine moms" that's been fighting to keep pornographic books in Ohio K-12 school libraries is launching a new offensive.

"Red Wine and Blue," founded by political consultant Katie Paris, has officially joined "Vote No in August," a coalition of left-leaning Ohio activist groups opposing an Aug. 8 ballot initiative to make it harder to change the state constitution. 

Paris fears the initiative, which raises the vote threshold from 50 percent to 60 percent, would make it more difficult for groups like hers to enact laws by statewide referendum, end-running the Ohio State Legislature.

The group's issue priorities: banning parental notification of teenage abortions in Ohio, requiring public schools to include instruction in so-called "Critical Race Theory," and to teach sex education far earlier, as young as first grade, while barring schools from teaching children that there is such a thing as biological sex.

To these ends, Red Wine and Blue is promoting books like Gender Queer and This Book Is Gay, which emphasize "transsexual" themes and even feature comic graphics depicting homosexual sex acts. While technically  pornographic, the group holds they still have educational value, and that schools aren't encouraging children to have sex or to become gay.

Paris argues the books are just as appropriate to each as "Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway, (or) the Bible."

Opposing Red Wine and Blue and the coalition, and backing the Aug 5 initative are the state's leading Republicans, including Governor Mike DeWine, U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

Socialism & Slavery Reparations

Other "Vote No in Ohio" coalition members are pushing currently unpopular policy ideas the legislature won't pass, but that they could enact via state referendum. 

Black Lives Matter Cleveland wants white, Hispanic and Asian Ohioans to pay slavery reparations, an idea gaining steam in states like California.

The Solon-based Black Environmental Justice Association believes all state government agencies should "incorporate the 'Principles of Economic Justice,'" which "affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth" and declares that blacks' "political, economic and cultural liberation... has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression" by white Ohioans, who have been "poisoning (black) communities and land" and leading the "genocide of (black) peoples."

The Ohio Communist Party wants to end capitalism in the state an "form a more perfect union" with socialism.

Including Ohio, currently 15 U.S. states allow for statewide initiatives to change their constitutions, including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Dakota. 

Illinois, Arizona and Florida have 60 percent vote thresholds; Colorado's is 55 percent.