Sandy Springs, Georgia- Sandy Springs has lowered the Bada Boom on its local versions of the Bada Bing.
As one of its first acts as a municipality, the Sandy Springs City Council clamped some tight restrictions on the new city's thriving adult entertainment businesses. If you didn't see this coming, you need your eyes checked.
Among other restrictions, the businesses will have to choose between letting customers buy booze or watch naked women dance. And those that choose the naked women will have to keep 4 feet of separation between the nude dancers and their patrons.
Oh, and those darkened private booths in the video stores? They'll have to go.
Which sets me to wondering: WWSD? (What Would Silvio Do?)
The proprietor of the Soprano family's nudie bar, the Bada Bing, would probably call on his goon squad to break a few fingers on the hands of these newly elected moralists. But that's Jersey and television. This is Georgia and real life.
The strip joints and video stores in Sandy Springs are turning instead to their legal eagles to fight the new ordinances as an unfair restriction on their right to operate a legal business. You're excused if you've heard this claim before. They've been working it for a decade or so around metro Atlanta.
It's a losing argument designed to make the city spend money to defend itself in hopes of creating enough backlash among frugal taxpayers that the city will eventually back off its rules. The argument won't work. Busting up the unsavory business of adult entertainment is among the reasons most often cited by voters who wanted Sandy Springs to become a city.
When you think about it, it's hard to find a better example of community standard-setting than what the new Sandy Springs City Council is doing with these new rules. The voters asked for them, and now they've got them.
You can debate whether the clubs are really that bad for the community - whether, for instance, they encourage serious crime or merely victimless crime in the form of prostitution. Most of the studies on the issue are flawed or inconclusive, at best.
And you can argue that the new city ought to have higher priorities than harassing a half-dozen or so nudie bars and peep shows. It probably does. But it's pretty clear Sandy Springs residents want their council to do something. For years they have complained that Fulton County government refused to take their complaints about the businesses seriously. And, rightly or wrongly, the strip clubs have become the first order of business.
The city appears to be on solid ground, legally.
Courts at both the state and federal level have consistently ruled that local governments can't ban adult entertainment businesses or zone them out of existence. But they do have the authority to say where they can go and make them abide by local rules about what they can and can't do.
The new ordinances are based on similar laws passed in Marietta, Kennesaw and Gwinnett County; those regulations have survived numerous court challenges by the same folks now seeking to get the Sandy Springs laws overturned.
In some ways, the Sandy Springs ordinances are even tougher than those enacted by the city's other suburban counterparts. And some of those provisions may indeed be subject to court-ordered revision. But, in the end, the new laws are likely to stand. Sandy Springs has the authority, within well-proscribed constitutional limits, to set whatever community standards it wishes.
And what will happen to the strip joints and video stores? If the experience in Marietta and other places with similar laws is any predictor, some of them will close, others will try to stay in business as juice bars with nude dancers (bring your own booze, in other words) and others may become more traditional night clubs with dancing women in skimpy clothes, but not, as Lewis Grizzard used to say "N-E-double K, by god, I-D."
As the great sage and philosopher of Moreland also once observed, if the deity had wanted sex to be performed in public, he would never have given us motel rooms.
Sandy Springs voters feel much the same way. If you want to see naked women dancing, go to Atlanta.
