Bureaucrats lose. Free expression wins
Kudos to the ACLU (For once):
"Dressed in a low-cut pink shirt, tight black booty pants, and thick, plastic platform stilettos, Stephanie Babines doesn’t look the part of a political rabble-rouser. Yet an activist is exactly what Babines became when her efforts to help women shape up through fully clothed, decidedly G-rated stripper-inspired aerobics ran afoul of overzealous officials in the small western Pennsylvania town of Mars. This unyieldingly perky 31-year-old entrepreneur, standing in the small forest of steel poles that shoot up from the floor of her mirrored dance and fitness studio, has taught dance-phobic authorities an expensive lesson in federal court.
Babines sank thousands into renovating her studio. The town inspector made mostly small requests light the exit sign, replace the furnace valve, and so on. But then she was blindsided by a subsequent letter declaring that the studio, which was christened Oh My You’re Gorgeous, was an “adult business” ineligible for an occupancy permit. This was a perplexing pronouncement on a facility that forbade spectators and catered solely to fully clothed women.
Appeals to the zoning board went nowhere... Babines’ two allotted appeals were denied... Legal bills piled up. Babines contemplated selling her house to continue the fight in state court. Desperate, she took a day off from work and drove to the Pittsburgh offices of the American Civil Liberties Union...
“We don’t usually take on zoning cases, but look more closely and this really is a classic ACLU case,” ACLU attorney Sarah Rose says. “Government officials were using the zoning code to crack down on the First Amendment–protected teaching of an expressive art they found controversial.” Last August the ACLU filed a scathing complaint in federal court, comparing authorities in Adams Township, of which Mars is a borough, unfavorably to communists (“while a repressive country like China allows dance studios to teach pole dancing, the defendants in this small Butler County town have misapplied their zoning code to deny Ms. Babines her right to teach this new combination of art and sport to interested adult women”) and requesting relief from “the pall of orthodoxy imposed by defendants on the people in their town who wish to communicate unconventional ideas.”
The township folded. Babines had her occupancy permit by October. In February she was awarded $75,000 in damages and attorney’s fees.
Source
4 comments:
Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So the aclu was on the right side for once. Good for them! As for this PA. town and it's fascist officials, perhaps their name seems more appropriate now.
My only complaint with this story is that there's no video of the dance class in action!
Something for us to remember this weekend;
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Of course, the council's decision was ridiculous, and it was god that it was overturned. But I fail to see what this has got to do with the First Amendment. The First Amendment refers to freedom of speech and the press. Logically, this covers the two areas essential for the running of a democratic society: dissemination of information and the expression of opinions. But dancing and other artistic expressions are saleable commodities and, even though they should have minimal control by governments, let us not suggest they are necessary to democracy. "Freedom of expression" is not the same as "freedom of speech".
Good point Malcolm, but you're a bit late. The Supremes long ago decided that "expression" is part of free speech. Kinda nutty, but that's what they said.
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