🚨 Ohio House Passes HB 486 — and the Track Records of Its Sponsors Matter 🚨
The Ohio House just passed HB 486, the “Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act.”
If enacted, it would push public schools and universities to highlight the “positive impacts” of Judeo-Christian religion in American history — a clear shift toward government promotion of one religious tradition, something the First Amendment does not permit.
Every Ohio Democrat present voted no.
Here’s what Ohio families need to understand:
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📚 History teachers already teach about religion.
Ohio classrooms already cover the Pilgrims, the Founders’ religious influences, religious dynamics in the Constitutional Convention, religion’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, and more.
Nothing in current law forbids teaching about religion — it forbids promoting it.
As Rep. Sean Brennan, a former teacher, put it:
“The Constitution doesn’t prevent us from teaching about religion. It prevents us from promoting it.”
HB 486 is not solving a real problem.
It’s creating a new one.
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🧑⚖️ The Founders were not uniformly ‘Judeo-Christian.’
While many were Protestant, a significant number — including Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine — were Unitarians or Deists, rejecting divine intervention and traditional doctrine.
Any honest history course must reflect all of this, not push a single narrative.
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🧵 Now, let’s look at the sponsors. Because context matters.
Bills don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of patterns — and HB 486 fits directly into a long lineup of legislation trying to inject specific religious and ideological agendas into public education.
👤 Representative Gary Click
(Primary Sponsor)
• A pastor and legislator who authored Ohio’s anti-trans bill banning gender-affirming care for minors and excluding trans girls from girls’ sports.
• Championed religious released time expansion, which opened doors widely for programs like LifeWise to pull students out of class for church during school hours.
• Works closely with Christian nationalist advocacy networks.
👤 Mike Dovilla (Co-sponsor)
Mike Dovilla for Ohio
• Paired with Click to promote HB 486 as a way to highlight the “positive impact” of Judeo-Christian religion.
• Part of the same bloc consistently pushing bills framed as “parents’ rights” or “religious liberty,” but that ultimately give special treatment to select religious beliefs.
👥 Key Cosponsors
Many cosponsors of HB 486 have also championed:
• “Divisive Concepts” bills restricting honest teaching about race and history.
• Proposals suggesting the Holocaust should be taught from “multiple perspectives.”
• Anti-vaccine legislation opposed by Ohio’s medical community.
This is the same set of lawmakers repeatedly trying to reshape public education around their religious and political preferences. LIKE RTRI.
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🎯 The Pattern Is Clear
Ohio has recently seen:
• Mandatory religious release time access
• Ten Commandments and “moral instruction” pushes
• Restrictions on LGBTQ+ students
• Efforts to censor how race and history can be taught
• And now HB 486, steering curricula toward a state-endorsed religious narrative
These are not isolated initiatives.
They are coordinated steps in a broader movement to inject Christian nationalism into public education.
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🛑 SEA’s Position
The Secular Education Association supports:
✔️ Teaching about religion in a factual, balanced, academically sound way
✔️ Inclusive public schools that serve every child
✔️ Neutrality from government when it comes to religion — as the Constitution requires
We oppose:
❌ Government promotion of one faith’s “positive impacts”
❌ Curriculum mandates rooted in ideology, not scholarship
❌ Policies that erode the separation of church and state or sideline nonreligious and minority-faith students
Ohio’s families deserve evidence-based education, not state-endorsed religious messaging.
Public schools belong to everyone.
Ohio House Dems
Ohio Senate Democrats
What people are saying:
- Facebook User: How many different views can they teach about the Holocaust? It was atrocious, horrible, etc every other word that indicates bad. Is there some idea that some will try to paint that picture in any other way?
- Facebook User: We don’t have to wonder why Ohio has dropped from #5 to #20 in the last 20 years in terms of k-12 academic achievement. Plus our “illustrious” legislators would rather rob public k-12 schools of almost $1 billion dollars THIS YEAR-so they can give it to private, and low achieving charts.
- Facebook User: Oh while we remove American Indian and Slavery ..got it.Separation of Church from State seems to of escaped the GOP led Ohio
- Facebook User: The positive impacts of which religions? Just one?
- Facebook User: so there will be equal parallel bill to be proposed about its detriments, to be taught along side.
- Facebook User: Without the Islamic Golden Age, we wouldn’t have a lot of the foundations on which modern science is built.
In the Middle Ages, monks and nuns in scriptoroiums preserved records historians still use.
The Templars invented travelers’ checks.
Indiginous cultures’ animist relationships with Turtle Island kept it vibrant and healthy. Then white Christian extremists showed up and here we are.
- Facebook User: So we are no longer going to teach about the Salem Witch trials? That was some fine religious actions there.
- Facebook User: Absolutely NOT!!!!
- Facebook User: F this! We have no say in anything in this state anymore! They sneak things in and push things through constantly. This is such BS!
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