Warning: Subject matter of this story is not appropriate for children. The City of Miami is encountering resistance in its efforts to shut down a live, homosexual pornographic website that city officials say is operating illegally.
Warning: Subject matter of this story is not appropriate for children.
The City of Miami is encountering resistance in its efforts to shut down a live, homosexual pornographic website that city officials say is operating illegally.
Imagine that the house next door is actually the set of a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week homosexual orgy, webcast live over the Internet. And imagine, to your horror, that city officials can do nothing to shut it down. That is the situation residents in one Miami neighborhood face -- at least for now. "This is normally something that a city can prohibit under its sexually oriented business ordinances, which severely restrict where this kind of business may be located," says Pat Trueman with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). "Now, the complicating problem here is that there is a U.S. Court of Appeals decision in that same circuit previously on a similar business that seems to indicate that a sexually oriented business ordinance would not apply." Trueman – former chief obscenity prosecutor for the Justice Department, who now serves as special counsel to the ADF – says the City of Miami should move forward with the prosecution and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if they lose at the lower court level. "In the Supreme Court cases on sexually oriented businesses, the key is not whether customers come to the business or not; the key is whether there are harmful secondary effects," Trueman explains. "And with respect to this house where sex acts are filmed, you have harmful secondary effects." According to Trueman, those harmful secondary effects include the great likelihood that participants in the webcasts will contract sexually transmitted diseases and the reduction of property values that inevitably follows when the public learns that such activities are taking place in a neighborhood. He contends the Supreme Court has been very supportive of cities' efforts to regulate such businesses for exactly those reasons.
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