Mayor Dick Greco and the Tampa City Council look ridiculous for wasting so much time, and so many city resources, in their crusade to ban lap dancing. The ban doesn't even address the sexual play in Tampa's strip clubs that supporters of the new law find immoral. Those acts, featured so gratuitously in the city's very own pornographic videotape, were already illegal. If this cynical exercise backfires and costs taxpayers in the courts, voters should hold council members responsible for putting their careers ahead of sound public policy. The new ordinance bars nude dancers from rubbing against customers or other strippers.
Dancers can skirt the law by donning a bikini.
The city claimed its intent was to guard against crime and sexually transmitted disease generated by the clubs, yet offered no proof that a lap dance ban would achieve either objective. Many of the critics who spoke at public hearings were dancers, customers and others who had a stake in thwarting the lap dance ban. Bob Buckhorn, the prime sponsor on City Council, risks becoming a one-trick pony with his perennial moral crusades. Citizens have a right to expect the police to enforce prostitution and obscenity laws that already are in the books. That's not what the lap dance ban is about.