Lap Dancing Our Way To Victory

The eternal question has finally been answered, folks.

Where should society draw the line between what government can and can't legislate when it comes to morality? In Scottsdale, the answer can be found at your local strip club.

Morality was at play when Scottsdale voters decided they wanted to protect lap dances at their strip clubs.

The moral for city leaders: Don't impose your values on our businesses.

"I don't think there was a great sympathy for pole dancers," said Jason Rose, a GOP strategist.

Scottsdale voters said "No" to covering up dancers and keeping them 4 feet away from patrons.

The city passed the regulations updating its sexually oriented businesses ordinance in December, a few months after adult-film star Jenna Jameson bought Babe's Cabaret. Upset, strip-club supporters took the issue to voters with Proposition 401.

With an unknown number of ballots left to count, the measure was still losing Wednesday by about 6 percentage points.

Voters seemed driven by a concern that the council had railroaded the clubs and a libertarian distrust of government meddling with small businesses.

"It wasn't a pro-strip club vote," said Scottsdale City Councilman Bob Littlefield, who said he regrets voting for the new rules last year. "It was an anti-council vote. We overreached. We were wrong."

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Now that it's been established that Republican voters will react in anger when they don't get unfettered access to g-strings and pasties, how many millenia will it take for them to see that it's the same type of iodicy that brings about legislation like this and this?

Arizona voters - before you head out to whatever evening frivolity tickles your fancy, make sure you check out Blog for Arizona's handy guide to the slew of 2006 Ballot Initiatives. You can ponder their implications at happy hour (but watch out for the guy with the gun, it's probably Randy Graf).