Brothel ad ban: Ruling a silly and futile attempt at mind control

Break out the burqas, baby, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals is here to protect you.

In a bizarre, rambling opinion laced with the history of prostitution and various logical circumvolutions, a panel of the court Thursday upheld Nevada's ban on brothel advertising in counties in which prostitution is putatively illegal. The court swallowed the state's quirky contention that the ad ban is a legally defensible prohibition against free speech because the state is trying to prevent the "commodification and commercialization" of sex.

Talk about your lost causes. Look out all you pamphleteers on the Strip with your tabloids and business cards for out-call services. They might be on to you. All those beer commercials, night club ads, lingerie ads, you name it, are in big trouble.

States can't ban the advertising of gambling, even it is illegal in a particular state. States can't ban ads for out-of-state liquor stores. States can't ban ads for abortion clinics. But commodification of sex, there's a nanny state blindfold they can get behind.

Wrap your peepers around some of the legal legerdemain in the ruling: "(P)rohibitions on prostitution reflect not a desire to
discourage the underlying sexual activity itself but its sale. Prostitution without the exchange of money is simply sex,
which in most manifestations is not a target of state regulators. ... The risk that states will cite the risk of commodification as a fig leaf for hostility to the underlying 'product,' so to speak — which might be present if an anti-commodification rationale were advanced to justify bans on other types of advertising — is minimal here. More fundamentally, this genuine objection to buying and selling means that in the context of prostitution an advertisement is an integral aspect of the harm to be avoided. In contract terms, an advertisement is an invitation to deal and may operate as an offer, though in the typical case it does not bind the seller."

The state legalized it, but doesn't want anyone to know it? It's not the act, but the thought?

Then there are flights of fantasy such as this: "Common sense counsels that advertising tends to stimulate demand for products and services. Conversely, prohibitions on advertising tend to limit demand."

How'd that Prohibition thing work out, again? And all those other vice laws, too?

This is so much mind game dithering. Free speech is free speech, and a ban is a ban.

The First Amendment was intended to stop the government from engaging in coercive efforts to shape the minds of free citizens by limiting access to ideas and thoughts to which the powers that be object. That includes thoughts that take the mind to ethereal heights and those that merely titillate.

This ruling may or may not be appealed. The Supreme Court may or not may think it worth their time.