FIC Blog

From yesterday’s CT Post:

MILFORD — The Board of Aldermen was poised Monday night to replace the strict ordinance regulating adult businesses with even more stringent rules based on recent court decisions.

No vote had been taken by press time, but the board’s ordiance committee approved the revisions after an hour-long public hearing that included language that would make the city’s Puritan founders blush.

The changes prohibit doors on peep show booths, limit the hours of operation for sexually oriented businesses and clarify the appeals procedure for those denied a license. The new ordinance, like the one it replaces, would not be enforced until the lawsuit brought by the only affected business against the city is resolved, aldermanic chairman Thomas F. Beirne said…

Scott Bergthold, a nationally-known authority in the regulation of sexually-oriented businesses and the city’s outside counsel, led the aldermen through a presentation of the secondary effects of sexually oriented businesses, which throughout the session were referred to as “SOBs.”

The descriptions of some of the lewd sex acts reported at adult clubs across the country that filled two white binders of testimony were necessary, Beirne said, to demonstrate the secondary impact of the businesses on a community…

City Attorney Marilyn Lipton said the changes incorporate recent federal court rulings that allow communities to consider the “secondary effects” of adult businesses, including the potential spread of disease…

Bergthold presented the aldermen studies Monday night that he said show that calls to police about adult businesses are only weakly correlated to actual crime. “Most vice crimes don’t result in a call for service,” the legal expert said. “Studies have shown an increase in sexual assault and property crime, but a government’s interest in regulating these businesses exists independently of any comparative analysis.”

It is indeed in the government’s interest to ensure some baseline level of societal decency in which families–including the lower income families most likely to live near the “SOBs”–may safely raise their children. The “secondary effects” one SOB once had on a Milford neighborhood–before Bishop Ramirez helped shut it down–were ably covered in a Carole Bass article in the New Haven Advocate a few years ago (which appears, alas, to no longer be available online).

We congratulate those communities willing to fight the SOBs. You can read about a few more at Pray Connecticut.