Provo should have been quicker. Like many other cities along the Wasatch Front, it should have passed a zoning law that restricts sexually oriented businesses to parts of town far away from mainstream families and businesses.
In South Jordan, for instance, the official zone for such businesses is on a strip of land next to the dump. Not coincidentally, the city has yet to receive a request for a business license from a strip club or a porn shop.But Provo didn't plot such a strategy, perhaps thinking it didn't need to in a town famous for a church-owned university and a percentage of two-parent families that far exceeds the norm. Then last month LeMar's, a downtown bar, began a regular show of dancers stripped to pasties and bikini bottoms, all legally licensed and approved by the city.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said so-called adult businesses are protected under the First Amendment. But it allows cities to regulate their locations through zoning laws, and, in a case handed down six years ago, it graciously allowed states and cities to outlaw totally nude dancing, reasoning that governments fairly even-handedly prohibit nudity in other areas of life and that, after all, a pasty and a G-string don't do much to muzzle a dancer's free-speech rights - the message still gets through.
But it won't allow them to outlaw partially nude dancing, no matter how suggestive.
So now the parents and other concerned residents near LeMar's are in a quandary. The few Provo folks who seem to care about this (only about 50 showed up for a meeting to discuss it), need to be prepared to scale mountains of sticky, thorny and highly effective misinformation if they are to succeed.
Sexually oriented businesses tend to expose the duplicity of America's public morals. Officially, we are a nation that approaches the subject like stranded hikers crawling along a precipitous ledge in the dead of night, afraid to fall off the edge yet determined to keep going.
Everyone from the president down crusades for a drop in the teen pregnancy rate, a greater sense of responsibility among fathers and an ethos that puts responsibility above pleasure. Yet parents and communities have a difficult time finding legal ways to keep naked dancers out of their neighborhoods. Even the mere effort runs them the risk of being branded as prudes and intolerant.
Defenders of sexually oriented businesses tend to rely on two lies to gain points. The first is that communities are being backward and out-of-step when they fight them. In reality, this is a fight being waged in scores of cities nationwide, from Laredo, Texas, where the county has refused to renew the license of its only strip club (like LeMar's, the dancers were only partially nude), to Cincinnati, where the City Council last week was trying to zone smut peddlers out of neighborhoods.
The second, and most potent lie is that these businesses don't hurt anybody; all they do is provide an outlet for people who enjoy such entertainment. The evidence shows otherwise. Sexually oriented businesses are as harmless as providing a bonfire for pyromaniacs to enjoy the heat without touching it, and the sex industry does a remarkable job of recruiting new customers.
According to a recent story in U.S. News & World Report, a publication called Adult Video News calculates Americans spent $8 billion on hard-core videos as well as sexual entertainment on computers, cable television and live performances in 1996. That is more than Hollywood collected from all its domestic box office receipts that year.
Back in 1972, in an age before VCRs and computers, the industry retailed a total of $10 million or less. The demand just wasn't there. During that same 25-year period, not surprisingly, the number of strip clubs also has skyrocketed, to close to 2,500 nationwide today.
Can anyone seriously doubt that the rise in teen pregnancies and fatherless homes during that period is not at least somewhat related? The mantra of immediate pleasure over long-term responsibility has a powerful pull on young and old alike.
Provo should have been quicker. Like South Salt Lake, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County, it can't do much at this point to legally stop what it thought would never come. The city is planning to rezone such businesses to industrial areas, but it probably can't do anything to stop the dancers at LeMar's. All concerned residents can do is exercise their own First Amendment rights and argue loud and long for decency.