string mutual fund. You're about to retire a rich man. News about the Surpreme Court's decision, Wednesday, to make it easier for local governments to ban nude dancing is starting to sink in Thursday. The court, in effect, got into the time machine and pushed the 1960's button, thus reincarnating the concept of Go-Go bars.
The Supreme Court ruling is saying that freedom of expression can now be restricted and nude dancing can be banned in an effort to combat crime and other societal harms that adult entertainment clubs are supposed to attract. The justice reinstated a public-nudity ordinance in Erie, Pa.
Writing the court's main opinon, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that such dancing is "expressive conduct" but it falls "only within the outer ambit" of the Constitution's First Amendment free-speech protection. The ban promotes Erie's "interest in combating the negative secondary effects associated with adult entertainment establishments," such as crime, and was not aimed at a dancer's erotic message, O'Connor said. The court's ruling is likely to have broad impact in the approximately 3,000 adult clubs nationwide that feature nude entertainment.
"We're delighted," said Valerie Sprenkle, Erie's assistant city solicitor. "We didn't ban any expression. ... What's being regulated is the means of expression." Sprenkle said dancers at a nude dancing club in the city "will be required to cover up to the extent required by the ordinance."
Jim Waple, general manager of Archibald's nightclub, which offers nude dancing two blocks from the White House, said, "Everybody wants to put these businesses out of business. ...What crime does it cause? We don't have any drug dealers out front. We don't have any prostitutes out front."
The Supreme Court ruling bolsters the effect of a 1991 Supreme Court ruling that let Indiana ban all barroom-style nude dancing under a state law generally prohibiting public nudity. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court originally struck down Erie's ordinance, it said the 1991 ruling offered little guidance. The Court voted 6-3 to reinstate the Erie ordinance.
O'Connor said that even if the ordinance "has some minimal effect on the erotic message by muting that portion of the expression that occurs when the last stitch is dropped, the dancers... are free to perform wearing pasties and G-strings." She compared the nude-dancing ban to a prohibition on burning draft cards, which the Supreme Court upheld in 1968. In that case, the government "sought to prevent the means of the expression and not the expression of anti-war sentiment itself," she said. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas voted to go even further. They cited "the traditional power of government to foster good morals."
Erie's 1994 ordinance was challenged by Nick Panos, who used to own the Kandyland nude-dancing club. He later sold the club to a new owner, Joseph Cunningham, who closed it and opened a similar club, Kandy's Dinner Theater, at a new location with a sign out front that proclaims: "First Amendment Rights Headquarters."
