Score One For First Amendment Rights..
One issue that has always been of first-order importance to me – my whole life, in fact – has been that of first amendment protections of free speech and a free press. I personally feel that it’s better to err on the side of inconvenience or even discomfort for the masses in the interest of protecting free speech, however inflammatory or salacious it might be. In the end, I believe that even the most horrific ideas being voiced publicly will serve only to incriminate the speaker by putting a spotlight on ill thoughts and agendas. It’s those sneaky types who say one thing in public but have a very different actual agenda they are planning to put forward that you really have to worry about.. And they never say what they are really thinking…
For a long time now there have been laws here in Nevada limiting advertising for brothels, specifically advertising in counties that have outlawed prostitution. For whatever your opinion of the legalized brothel system in Nevada, free speech isn’t something you should be required to surrender because you have applied for and obtained that unusual type of business license. For many, many years, Nevada was the only state that allowed another formerly super-taboo-but-taxable sin: gambling. If you were a licensee for an old resort such as the Flamingo or Binion’s Horseshoe and it was made illegal to advertise your business in another area of the country because gaming was illegal there, it would put an undue burden on you as a licensee and business owner, regardless of how well-run your company was or how heavily you were taxed. People are so used to gambling being acceptable now it might sound a bit peculiar to draw the comparison, but in a purely legal and business sense, licensing-wise it’s really the same thing. If anything, this Nevada law is even more hypocritical than would have been the hypothetical above because we’re saying it’s okay over there, but a few miles up the road you can’t even mention it publicly, regardless of the fact that the brothels are well-regulated by the government and their license fees are astronomical – hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, in many cases. Keeping a business of any kind afloat with that amount of overhead requires lots of one thing in particular: advertising.
A federal judge has finally said that counties in Nevada that ban prostitution can not ban advertising for brothels as it is a violation of free speech rights. It’s amazing to me how this sort of thing has to make it to a federal court due to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to be corrected, but I suppose those are the times we’re still living in.
Here is a link to an article regarding the outcome of the court case. The suit was filed on behalf of a brothel owner… and two newspapers. If it’s illegal to sell advertising to certain legal businesses, publishers miss out on revenue from that ad space, as well.. and that’s another facet of the first amendment – freedom of the press. The law in a round-and-about way said that the press was not legally able to print as they saw fit. What a horrible idea run amok…
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