Kansas bill would restrict strip-club hours, end alcohol sales

Kansas lawmakers on Tuesday weighed adopting tougher restrictions on strip clubs and adult bookstores, including a ban on full nudity at strip clubs and a ban against building a “sexually oriented business” within 1,000 feet of schools and houses of worship.

The bill, reviewed Tuesday by the Senate Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice, is identical to a Missouri law that was upheld by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2011.

Senate Bill 147 would prevent strip clubs from being open between midnight and 6 a.m. or serving alcoholic beverages.

Phillip Cosby, executive director of the American Family Association of Kansas & Missouri, argued that the bill’s provisions were reasonable regulations to place on an industry he called toxic to communities.

“These are flesh peddlers. These are merchants of misery,” he said.

Philip Bradley, lobbyist for the Equal Entertainment Group, which represents strip clubs, called the bill “overreach regulation searching for a problem that doesn’t exist.”

He said that many communities in the state, including Sedgwick County, have adopted their own laws to regulate the industry.

“Local regulation works,” he said.

He said that taking away alcohol sales and closing clubs by midnight, their most profitable hours, would put many clubs out of business. He argued this was the intent of the bill and that it would cost the state of Kansas more than $1 million in tax revenue and about 1,000 jobs.

Christine McDonald, a program director at Restoration House of Greater Kansas City, an organization that helps survivors of sex trafficking, testified that she was recruited to work in a strip club as a minor in the 1980s.

She argued that the legal sex industry often intertwines with the illegal sex trade and that eliminating alcohol would make clubs safer for the women who work there.

Sen. Tom Arpke, R-Salina, the bill’s main proponent in the Legislature, said that as a Republican he supports limited government, but that he considers this industry an area that should be regulated. He noted that the Kansas Republican Party’s platform opposes pornography in all forms.

This story was originally published February 17, 2015 at 11:16 AM with the headline "Kansas bill would restrict strip-club hours, end alcohol sales."