[497] in libertarians
Speaking of the new GOP moralism wave
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Sat Dec 10 14:03:57 1994
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
Cc: safe@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 1994 14:02:49 EST
From: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>
Think the IRF will file an amicus brief? ;)
- - -
New York City Mayor Launches War on Pornography Sellers By Terence Samuel,
The Philadelphia Inquirer Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News
NEW YORK--Dec. 7--Ron comes to the city about twice a month from Maryland. He
likes to go to the same topless bar downtown after dinner to unwind a little,
he says, or less frequently, to a peepshow on Eighth Avenue on his way back
to his hotel.
Part of the ritual is curiosity, he said. Another part is that he feels a
little more daring in New York than when he's at home.
"Nothing wrong with it, and I think it's my own business," said Ron, a
43-year-old lawyer who declined to give his last name.
"This is America ... This is New York." But those sex-related, adult
establishments that make him feel daring have become the business of
community groups, politicians and business organizations who see them as
nothing more than a blight on the city.
They say they hurt property value and encourage crime. Their opponents sound
a lot like Ron: This is New York. This is America. This is no place for
censorship; that's unconstitutional.
"This is so much more of a cosmopolitian area, and there is no common
morality, " said Richard Kunis, owner of a Manhattan store that sells and
rents X-rated movies.
"There is common respect. What one person finds entertaining, others find
offensive, but these are just words and pictures, and who is it for the
government to come in and say that you can't watch something you find
entertaining. New York has always been a censorship-free city."
If Kunis blames the government, it is because the leading crusader in this
war on sex stores is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who got elected last year on
the promise to tackle problems he lumped together as "quality of life
issues."
In the past 11 months, Giuliani's quality of life evangelism has meant
running the squeegee men out of the Bowery, throwing panhandlers off the
subway and flooding Greenwich Village with cops on weekends night to make
sure making sure drunken kids didn't urinate into basement apartments or play
their radios too loud.
The mayor's effort has gained him widespread praise. Now he has turned to sex
shops. He wants them out. But, Kunis objects, "What about the quality of sex
lives. That's part of life too."
Giuliani has proposed restricting all the bars and stores and theaters that
offer sexually oriented entertainment to industrial areas of the city,
distancing them from residential neighborhoods and commercial districts. So
far, the proposal includes no grandfather clause that would allow established
stores to stay. And while the staff of the City Planning Department is busy
developing guidelines for the new zoning proposals, the City Council has
passed a moratorium that prohibits any of those sex-related business from
opening or expanding in the city for an entire year. The prohibition is
absolute.
The whole idea has angered many sex shop operators, their customers and some
civil libertarians. Already, the New York Civil Liberties Union is poised to
file a lawsuit.
Norman Siegel, executive director of the group, said the moratorium is
"constitutionally flawed and very repressive."
Kunis is dismissive of the quality of life argument and even cast his
business as a boon to family values.
"I run a family business in which I cater to the mom and pop part of the
family," he said. "Philosophically, I have to say that we serve married
people, committed people who want to be titilated."
Kunis acknowledges that some sex-related establishment are offensive because
of the way the stand out in certain communities. There is, for example, the
former butcher shop on West Street that is now a sex video store with three
huge neon Xs flashing in the window 24 hours a day. There is the 25-cent
peepshow with scantilly clad men gracing the front window on Christopher
Street across the street from a grammar school.
"It's the store fronts and the signage - that's the problem," said Kunis.
"And that you can deal with with laws that are on the books now."
Ron, the Marylander who was walking out of a peepshow on 8th Avenue last
week, said he regarded the laws as yet more unwelcome government interference
in private lives. "Every time you turn around, they are just trying to
control, control," he said.
While the city cannot restrict access to the sex shops, it can regulate them.
They can, for example, be closed if the businesses are having an adverse
effect on the surrounding community - the crime rate and the property values
being the two most critical indicators.
"We think that the city's case is weak, and not persuasive," Siegel said.
Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square Business Improvement
District, countered that her organization has evidence that along the 10
blocks of Eighth Avenue with the highest concentration of adult
establishments, crime rates are higher and property value lower than other
blocks in the neighborhood.
Dykstra praised the part of the proposed new regulations that would bar adult
establishments from operating within 500 feet of each other.
"That is the thing that is really harmful - the sheer number and the sheer
concentration," she said. "So wherever these businesses end up, you will not
have that harmful concentration."
Much of the impetus for the proposal came from the Times Square officials,
who are involved in a desperate effort to return the famed district to its
storied past as center of the theater world, rather than the mecca for "adult
entertainment."
Dykstra said that while the sex-related theaters and adult establishments
came to dominate the area in the 1970s, that is only a small part of its
history.
"That is 'the' Broadway; the porn shops are a relatively new phenomenon," she
said.
Some sex-shop operators see the mayor's proposal as nothing more than
something manipulated by the big business interests in the Times Square area.
But it was neighborhood anger across the city that may have finally fired the
debate.
With the proliferation of video-rentals in the last decade, X-rated
videostores have popped up in places where topless bars or peepshows had
never been. That moved the sex-related businesss into neighborhoods in the
outer boroughs, areas that used to regard themselves as protected from the
seedier aspects of the sex stores of the city. Ironically, with the proposal
to move the shops into industrial areas, many of those neighborhoods could
end up with sex shops closer than before.
The new zoning proposals are expected to go before the City Planning
Commission sometime next month. With such a varied list of establishments
falling within the scope of the mayor's concern, there are lingering
questions about how each will be affected. How, for example, would a gay
bookstore in Chelsea, which serves as a center of life in the gay community,
be treated differently from a topless bar near the world trade center?
Edward Rogowsky, a member of the City Planning Commission, said questions of
fairness will be critical as the the proposal moves toward becoming law.
"We have a problem as to how some of these stores impact the quality of life
in some resedential neighborhoods in parts of the city," Rogowsky said. "The
controling principle on the moratorium is that as long as you're not
restricting access, you not restricting people's opportunity to engage in all
of these things ... We can't just throw freedom out the window because we are
experiencing certain problems."
Transmitted: 94-12-07 14:32:08 EST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Vernon Imrich | market failure, n. The inabilty of the |
| MIT OE, Rm 5-329b | market to recover from a blow by |
| Cambridge, MA 02139 | intervention. (The Exchange) |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
