PROVIDENCE, RI—The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has joined the fight to keep the iconic Providence strip club, The Foxy Lady, open and operating after the city’s licensing board shut the club down after three of the club’s strippers were arrested in December on prostitution charges, The Providence Journal reported.
In a “friend of the court” brief filed on New Year’s Eve, the ACLU said that closing down the club—which had been open, as AVN.com reported, for 38 years, making it New England’s longest continuously operating strip club—in response to the arrests of the three dancers on misdemeanor charges of sexual solicitation was a violation of the club’s free speech rights under the United States Constitution.
As AVN.com reported, the state’s Department of Business Regulation overruled the city licensing board and granted the club permission to repoen—but without nude or semi-nude performances by dancers. The state also required the club to meet with the city to come up with a reopening plan, and then take its case to the Rhodes Island Supreme Court—neither of which has happened yet.
The ACLU noted that “exotic,” also known as nude, dancing has been recognize by courts as a protected form of free expression under the First Amendment.
"Courts must be especially vigilant to protect exotic dancing and other types of unpopular speech precisely because they face the greatest threats of suppression,” the ACLU said in its court papers.
The ACLU brief also cited the licensing board’s history of hitting other, non-stripping establishments with more lenient penalties for more severe violations, “including felony acts of violence,” as evidence that the Foxy Lady was being singled out simply due to the “unpopular” type of expression—nude dancing—that takes place on its premises.
“The Constitution does not allow protected rights to be taken away on the whim of administrative officials,” said ACLU lawyer Jared Goldstein, in a statement quoted by The Providence Journal.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the Foxy Lady’s petition to reopen on Thursday, January 4.
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