10-18-1999 Planning Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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INTRODUCTION Many communities in Minnesota have raised concerns about the impact of sexually oriented businesses on their quality of life. It has been suggested that sexually oriented businesses serve as a magnet to draw prostitution and other crimes Into a vulnerable neighborhood. Community groups have also voiced the concern that sexually oriented businesses can have an adverse effect on property values and impede neighborhood revitalization. It has been suggested that spillover effects of the businesses can lead to sexual harassment of residents and scatter unwanted evidence of sexual liaisons in the paths of children and the yards of neighbors. Although many communities have sought to regulate sexually oriented businesses, these efforts have often been controversial and equally often unsuccessful. Much community sentiment against sexually oriented businesses is an outgrowth of ho^ity to sexually explicit forms of expression. Any successful strategy to combat sexually oriented businesses must take Into account the constitutional rights to free speech which limit available remedies. Only those pornographic materials which are detennined to be “obscene” have no constitutional protection. As explained later in more detaii, only that pornography which, according to community standards and taken as a whole, “appeals to the prurient interest” (as opposed to an interest in healthy sexuality), describes or depicts sexual conduct In a “patently offensive way” and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” can be prohibited or prosecuted. Miller v. California. 413 U.S. 15, 24 (1973). • Other pornography and the businesses which purvey it can only be regulated where a harm is demonstrated and the remedy is sufficiently tailored to prevent that harm without burdening Rrst Amendment rights. In order to reduce or eliminate the impacts of sexually oriented businesses, each community must find the balance between the dangers of pornography and the constitutional rights to free speech. Each community must have evidence of harm. Each community must know the range of; legal tools which can be used to combat the adverse impacts of pornography and sexually oriented businesses. •1.