DRAIN, Oregon — The city council of Drain, Oregon passed new regulations last week with the specific purpose of outlawing an adult entertainment establishment, under the guidance of an out-of-state, religiously motivated lobby linked to 1980s anti-porn crusader Ed Meese.
As XBIZ reported last month, after the June soft opening of a new adult entertainment establishment in Drain, the conservative small town became yet another battlefield in the nationwide moralistic crusade against sex-oriented businesses and sexual expression.
Two Drain City Council meetings in June, as reported by the local Cottage Grove Sentinel, highlighted a contradiction in the small Oregon community — which voted 64% for Donald Trump in the last election and overwhelmingly supports Republican candidates — between their dislike for government regulation of business and their desire to find a way to shutter the Top of the Bowl adult nightclub by any means necessary.
Last week, the anti-adult-entertainment crowd prevailed. In a special session on August 1, the Cottage Grove Sentinel reported, “the Drain City Council approved Ordinance 436 in a 3-2 vote, adding new definitions of prohibited conduct within city limits in regards to adult entertainment as well as introducing business licenses to the city’s Code of Ordinances.”
“If I’m reading the community accurately... the city drew a line in the concrete with this ordinance,” Councilor Jo Barker told The Sentinel. “They know it has teeth.”
Proponents of the new ordinance, the paper reported, “aim to restrict Top of the Bowl’s operations as well as future adult-oriented businesses.”
'Lewd Exhibitions'
The new pro-censorship ordinance states that “the City of Drain finds that it is necessary to license and regulate all lawful business, trade, occupation, profession or calling, carried on or conducted within the corporate limits of the city by establishing a business license permit; and, to license, regulate, control, restrain, and or prohibit the nuisances caused by adult entertainment businesses that serve alcohol beverages, pandering public nudity through ‘lewd exhibitions’ by establishing time, place and manner regulations for the public morals, public safety, public health and public convenience of the inhabitants of the city.”
The ordinance's agressively anti-sexual expression language states that the city and community “find that public nudity is public indecency taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive, is sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
On June 8, a few of Drain’s 1,100 citizens who opposed the Top of the Bowl nightclub, gathered at a City Council meeting, in the inland town 40 miles south of Eugene and 132 miles south of Portland.
“Pornography, nudity and illicitness is wrong,” said Barbara Evans. “It’s a sin and, I’m sorry, but it is not good for our community in any way shape or form.”
The previous month the group submitted 182 signatures “expressing concern about the nature of the business” and asking the typically hands-off City Council for more government regulation, requiring “500 to 1,000 feet between sexually-oriented adult entertainment businesses from any and all churches, schools and childcare facilities.”
Jessica Cooper, who drafted the letter, according to one report, “appealed to the town’s classic, 'good old days' charm and spirit where childhood innocence and neighborly relations can be preserved."
A 'Religious Freedom' Lobby Weighs in
On July 13, the town welcomed Ray Hacke, an attorney with the “religious freedom” legal aid group Pacific Justice Institute who, according to the Cottage Grove Sentinel, “responded to a letter sent by the Gateway Family Fellowship church.”
Pacific Justice Institute, the paper explained, “is a nonprofit legal defense organization specializing in the defense of religious freedom and parental rights. The nonprofit works pro bono in cases which involve the exercise of religion and other civil liberties and made headlines in May when it filed suit against Governor Kate Brown, challenging her emergency powers during the pandemic.”
Hacke told the Council that, regardless of the free speech issues, “an adult entertainment business has no business setting up shop right next to a church. It has no business setting up next to any place where children congregate.”
“These places do attract sexual predators,” Hacke added, with a zeal in his attack on an adult business which would have made Pacific Justice Institute’s board member Edwin Meese proud.
Recently, Ed Meese and his ideas have been making a comeback in Trump-era GOP circles.
The former Reagan Attorney General who once almost successfully shut down the entire adult entertainment industry, has kept a lower profile for decades, following his resignation in 1988 after the filing of a report alleging numerous accusations of abuse of power and corruption.
But last October, Donald Trump presented the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to Meese, calling the GOP’s most notorious anti-porn crusader “an absolute titan of American law and a heroic defender of the American Constitution.”
Drain’s new anti-adult-entertainment regulations passed by a narrow 3-2 vote, with the Libertarian-leaning, anti-regulation Mayor voting against them.
“If they come and try to shut us down, we’re not going to shut down,” said one of the owners of Top of the Bowl. “And at that point we will sue the City of Drain.”
