The Supreme Court of Oregon announced a 5-1 decision today in two cases that would have decreased our freedom of expression in this state, which, I believe, has the most expansive right of expression in the United States.
One ordinance that was ruled unconstitutional prohibited sexual touching in a city's strip clubs; the other would have required that strippers stay four feet away from their customers.
Now some Kossians might be bored, annoyed or even outraged by this decision, but it's actually a great day for freedom of expression in America. Why below the fold.
Here's part of an
APstory on the decisions:
Justice Michael Gillette, writing for the majority, said it "appears to us to be beyond reasonable dispute that the protection extends to the kinds of expression that a majority of citizens in many communities would dislike" - including nude dancing.
One case involved a Roseburg club where undercover police paid women to perform sexual activities while the officers watched. The court threw out the club owner's conviction for promoting a live sex show but upheld his conviction for promoting prostitution.
(snip)
The other case involved a city of Nyssa ordinance that required performers to keep their distance from customers. Owners of Miss Sally's Gentlemen's Club were fined $185 each for violating the ordinance.
Religious conservatives, neighborhood groups and local officials have complained that similar rulings from the high court have led to a thriving sex industry in Oregon.
But voters three times have rejected ballot measures that would have restricted the adult entertainment industry, most recently in 2000, when a measure to allow zoning of sex shops was defeated.
Gillette wrote that the majority could not find any indication that the Oregon Framers had in mind excluding public sexual touching when it wrote the freedom of expression clause.
Oregon is fortunate to have one of the western states constitutions, which tend to include greater individual freedoms than those of many older states. And it is indeed fortunate to have had as a justice Hans Linde, who argued successfully many years ago that the state's protection for expression was close to absolute. His opinion has had among its results a proliferation of strip bars, numbering 93 last time I heard. And some smaller cities have gone to extraordinary, and now we can say, unconstitutional, lengths to limit the clubs.
Today's decision, revealed almost two years after the cases were heard, which may indicate that a court that likes to find consensus had a difficult time here, reaffirms the Linde theory. And in a time when the national government seems bent on repressing expression and other other individual prerogatives, it's good for us all that at least one state can stand up and protect its citizens' constitutionally guaranteed rights. .
Yes, most strip clubs are squalid places, but it is always the disreputable defendent who needs his rights protected. As the old saw goes, the Archbiship of Canterbury doesn't need a First Amendment.
So next time you're in a strip club, tuck a dollar in a G-string for freedom!