Two years ago, the owners of the Exxxotica Expo sued the city of Dallas, Texas, after the city council there voted to ban the adult entertainment show from the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center because of the supposed “deleterious effects of pornography on society,” according to a report by The Dallas Observer.
The Expo’s owners sued on First Amendment grounds, saying that because the convention center is a public facility, it should not be allowed to discriminate against any potential client capable of paying the rent. But last year, the Observer reported, a judge threw out the suit on a technicality.
Federal Judge Sidney Fitzwater never ruled on the First Amendment issues, simply deciding that Three Expo Events, the company that sued Dallas over the ban, did not have the standing to file the lawsuit.
Why not? Because the business entity that signed the rental agreement with Dallas, that allowed the Exxxotica Expo to hold a show there, was not Three Expo, but a company called Exxxotica Dallas—a subsidiary of Three Expo.
But on Wednesday, two judges on a three-judge appeals court panel overturned Fitzwater’s reasoning as, essentially, ridiculous, saying that the city council’s intention was not simply to ban porn conventions from just one company, but from any company, The Dallas Morning News reported.
"No reasonable factfinder can read the record of the events leading up to and during the City Council meeting without finding that the mayor and City Council firmly intended to make certain that the Exxxotica convention would not be staged by anyone in the Convention Center in 2016," the judges wrote in their ruling. “Thus, a realistic sense of the purpose and effect of the resolution in this context was that Three Expo, the undisputed promoter and proposed presenter of Exxxotica 2016, was banned from presenting Exxxotica 2016 at the Dallas Convention Center under any guise or circumstance."
The appellate court also ordered the city to "pay... the costs on appeal to be taxed by the Clerk of this Court."
The district court must now make a decision on the substance of the case: whether or not the city has the right to ban adult-oriented conventions from its convention center.
The court ruling on Wednesday “absolutely supports our legal position and the constitutional rights of Three Expo to have access to a public forum such as the Dallas convention center,” a lawyer for the company told the Morning News.
Dallas has already coughed up $675,000 out of public coffers to defend the city’s ban on the expo, The Morning News reported. But a lawyer for Three Expo says that he wants the city to settle out of court with the company.
"[Wednesday's ruling] absolutely supports our legal position and the constitutional rights of Three Expo to have access to a public forum such as the Dallas convention center,” Three Expo's attorney Roger Albright said. “I would also now be hopeful that since this case is being handled by the City Attorney's Office, we can collectively find a path to resolution."
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