When I was in law school in Seattle over a decade ago, the city had had a de facto strip club moratorium in place for 17 years. A federal court ruled that this practice was so arbitrary as to be unconstitutional, opening the door for new clubs to open. The City Council responded by passing strict rules about how the clubs could operate, including a 4-foot separation between strippers and customers, and bright lighting like you might see in a grocery store.  The following year, voters rejected those ordinances by a 2-1 margin, because they were obviously stupid, arbitrary and capricious. Several years later the city again found itself on the wrong end of a federal court decision because they were dragging their feet approving new strip club licenses.

Who knew liberal Seattle needed Kevin Bacon to come dancing through town to teach everyone to lighten up?

So Seattle still has strip clubs, and subsequent studies show no statistically significant correlation between them and neighborhood property values or crime.

I thought about that history this week when the Reno City Council announced that it was not only moving forward with plans to oust strip clubs from the downtown area, but would move to further regulate and restrict conduct within the clubs as well, doing things like banning lap dances or raising the minimum age to be a sex worker to 21.

But in focusing on the What instead of the Where of strip clubs, the Reno city government is falling down a rabbit (bunny?) hole that will bring the council the opposite result of what the members want.

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My family and I were back in Seattle last week for a vacation, which of course necessitated playing tourist downtown – the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, lunch at the Starbucks corporate HQ (hey, when in Rome), art museums, a Ferris wheel, ferry rides – the kids loved it.

But in all that touristing, I never felt like I had to hustle my kids past less family-friendly establishments. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of smut to be found in the Emerald City if you want it, but it’s nice that you can easily avoid it, too.

That’s why I support the move to change our zoning ordinances to move strip clubs away from our city center. We don’t have to give up entertainment establishments that are inappropriate for kids to be around, but we don’t need our entire city – and especially not the downtown core – so saturated that we lose out on families who would otherwise come to take advantage of everything else Reno has to offer. It’s embarrassing to feel vastly more comfortable walking with my kids down the Seattle waterfront than strolling through Midtown here. (Seattle has plenty of other problems to be sure, and I moved here from there for a reason. But it still profits us to look at what does work in other cities, and take any lessons to be learned.)

But when you start talking about whether or not a stripper is allowed to earn money grinding her butt in the lap of drunk, creepy old men or college buddies at a bachelor party, it becomes a complexly different conversation altogether. Now you’re not trying to reach a compromise on the character of a public space every city denizen is entitled to share, but are regulating the conduct between consenting individuals. And that’s the trap.

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We, of course, regulate personal, private conduct all the time – you can’t mainline heroin, ride in a car without a seatbelt, grow your own weed, sell fireworks or walk down your suburban neighborhood in a birthday suit. Some of those regulations are appropriate, and many others are simply ridiculous. We can – and should – debate those laws and the philosophies underlying them, as we seek ever to find the right balance between individual liberty and public safety and prosperity.

Any business that sells sex as a commodity will be part of this debate, as the two excellent opinion pieces this last week in the Indy arguing for and against legal brothels remind us so clearly. We should not dance around the fact (pun intended) that sex work is different from other employment, in that literally selling one’s body is demeaning in a way no other crappy job could possibly be, and as a result, is fertile ground for the exploitation of the mentally ill and drug addicted. And Nevada’s historical reliance on vice as an economic driver has, I believe, done much to keep us culturally impoverished and at the bottom of far too many “good lists.” There is good reason for prostitution’s consistently terrible reputation throughout human history.

But the reality is that strip clubs are generally accepted as a legitimate business, lap dances included. There may be a time and place for everything, but just maybe a burgeoning downtown that wishes to stop being a pop culture synonym for “seedy” isn’t the time or place for “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS!!!” is not that place.  THAT’S the winning argument. Getting dragged into a debate about adults needing protection from their own choices via the heavy hand of government regulation in the context of topless pole-dancing is not.

If Mayor Hillary Schieve or the rest of the Reno City Council choose the latter path, they’ll lose, and have the worst of both worlds – a still-insufficiently family-friendly downtown, and being on the losing end of both lawsuits and public opinion.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].