Another reason Oregon is awesome, Live Sex Shows!

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Strip clubs just got a lot more interesting. Possible effects?

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Oregon Supreme Court overturns 2 sex-show laws

By The Associated Press
09.30.05

SALEM, Ore. — The Oregon Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional yesterday a state law against conducting live sex shows and a local ordinance regulating conduct of nude dancers.

Both restrictions violate the Oregon Constitution's guarantees of free speech and free expression, the court said in a pair of 5-1 decisions.

The free-expression rulings continued the state court's modern pattern of broadly interpreting state constitutional rights as forbidding virtually all regulation of obscenity.

The court's decisions have given Oregon "one of the most protective approaches to the interests of freedom of expression" of any state, said Steven Green, a Willamette University constitutional law professor.

"It certainly keeps us on the edge so far as what is expressive activity," he said.

The state constitution, adopted in 1859, says, "No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write or print freely on any subject whatever."

Justice Michael Gillette, who wrote the majority opinions, 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 — and even to physical acts, such as nude dancing or other explicit sexual conduct that have an expressive component."

One ruling involved the owner of a now-defunct Roseburg adult business featuring live sex performances in private rooms.

Charles Ciancanelli was convicted of the crime of promoting a live sex show after undercover police paid women to engage in sexual activities while the officers watched in the "performance rooms" at the business, called Angels.

The Supreme Court tossed out that conviction, although it did uphold Ciancanelli's conviction for promoting prostitution.

That ruling "appears to expand further Oregon's already expansive free-speech law," said Kevin Neely, spokesman for Attorney General Hardy Myers.

"We don't believe framers of the constitution intended to limit the Legislature's authority to regulate sexual conduct in public," Neely said. He said the decision even raised doubts "as to whether laws against indecency are constitutionally sound."

The high court's other ruling overturned an ordinance in the city of Nyssa that required performers to stay at least four feet away from patrons at nude-dancing clubs.

Owners of Miss Sally's Gentlemen's Club in the small Eastern Oregon town near the Idaho border were fined $185 each for violating the ordinance.

Religious conservatives, neighborhood groups and local officials have complained that state Supreme Court rulings have produced a thriving sex industry in Oregon.

The Nyssa ruling "seems to leave Oregon cities no room to adopt reasonable and fair regulations pertaining to adult establishments," said Christy Monson, legal counsel for the League of Oregon Cities.

"The court could have struck a fair balance between a dancer's right of expression and the community's right to regulate for the health, safety and welfare of its citizens," she said.

Carmel Bender, a Portland lawyer for an organization that helps former prostitutes, said she was "very disappointed" with the rulings.

Bender filed a brief in the nude-dancing case on behalf of the Portland-based Lola Green Baldwin Foundation for Recovery.

"It seemed like a good time to address inconsistencies in the laws," Bender said.

She argued that so-called lap dancing amounts to sexual conduct for money and appears to fit the definition of prostitution.

It would require a voter-passed constitutional amendment to revise the free-expression provisions. Voters have rejected such statewide ballot measures three times in the past 11 years. The most recent vote was in 2000, when a measure to allow zoning of sex shops was defeated.

The American Civil Liberties Union hailed the court rulings as maintaining freedom from official censorship.

"When people get to decide for themselves and for their families what they want to read, see and hear, that keeps the government out of those decisions," said David Fidanque, executive director of the Oregon arm of the ACLU.

At the same time, he said, the court's upholding of Ciancanelli's conviction for promoting prostitution shows "there are limits as to how far people can go under current Oregon law."

Ciancanelli objected to a lower court's conclusion that the performers in the two-female sex show committed prostitution.

The Supreme Court said that although some acts in sex shows might violate other laws, the overturned law that prohibited even presenting such shows was invalid as restraining free expression.

Both rulings reversed the Oregon Court of Appeals.

The lower court, also in split decisions, contended that bans on sexual performances should be allowed as "historical exceptions" to free-speech rights because there were restrictions on public nudity and sexual conduct when the constitution was adopted.

Supreme Court Justice Paul De Muniz dissented from both of yesterday's decisions.

De Muniz said he didn't believe that masturbation and sexual intercourse in a live public show "is a form of speech that the drafters of the Oregon Constitution sought to protect.

"I cannot conclude that legislative regulation of public sex acts must stop at the theater door," he said.



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