EAST COBB, Georgia — Weeks after approving unprecedented changes to its county code in order to target “sexually oriented businesses,” the Cobb County Board of Commissioners has now made its intentions explicit by announcing a hearing to permanently revoke the local business license for adult boutique Tokyo Valentino.
The hearing had been originally scheduled for today, but has now been delayed until October 27, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reports.
Tokyo Valentino’s attorney Cary Wiggins told the AJC that “his office made the request because they need more time to prepare for the hearing.”
The onslaught of municipal harassment against Tokyo Valentino is being watched around the country as a bellwether for local moralists' strategies to restrict free access to sexual expression, education and products via regulatory and zoning issues.
A Pattern of Municipal Harassment
The code amendments hastily passed earlier this month, reported local newspaper East Cobb News, “would limit sex shops and other adult businesses to two industrial zoning categories. All such businesses would be required to obtain a special license and employees would have to be issued a special permit.”
The changes, the East Cobb News reports, were directly and rapidly effected “after Tokyo Valentino, an Atlanta-based adult retail chain, opened a store on Johnson Ferry Road in the former Mattress Firm location across from Merchant’s Walk.”
Back in July, the Marietta City Council held a special meeting to decide if Tokyo Valentino could continue operating under the Georgia city’s zoning laws. After the rigged hearing — where the city lawyer responsible for the complaints against the store also acted the part of a judge — the City Council proceeded to suspend and revoke the license for 180 days and ordered Tokyo Valentino principal Michael Morrison to remove all items from the store.
The new East Cobb regulations make continuous reference to alleged “deleterious [harmful] secondary effects of sexually oriented business,” based on the circular-thinking notion that any business dealing with sex would attract a criminal element and therefore cannot be zoned near law-abiding society.
Such a regulation has the effect of forcing any business dealing with sex to set up shop in areas with a higher crime rate, self-fulfilling the prophecy of the guardians of morality who associate sexually oriented businesses with a broad, panic-inducing laundry list of “secondary” crimes.
Here’s how the Cobb Board of Commissioners define these “secondary effects” that supposedly follow any business dealing with human sexuality: “personal and property crimes, human trafficking, prostitution, potential spread of disease, lewdness, public indecency, obscenity, illicit drug use and drug trafficking, negative impacts on surrounding property, urban blight, litter and sexual assault and exploitation.”
The “secondary effects” argument is the only rationale given for the business-killing zoning changes.
Moralistic, Arbitrary Definitions of 'Lotions'
As was displayed in the Marietta County Council hearings, the campaign against Tokyo Valentino is motivated by moralistic, arbitrary considerations of its merchandise.
For example, Tokyo Valentino’s lotions were deemed “sexual” by the city authorities trying to shut them down, even though they’re essentially the same as what is sold in other stores.
During that hearing, when Wiggins cross-examined a church-decorated Marietta policeman who had been sent to buy several items at Tokyo Valentino, he asked the policeman about the merchandise being sold that he had classified as being “sexually related.”
“Lotions and gels,” Wiggins asked. "Are they considered sexual devices?”
“It wasn’t a lotion I’d seen at [supermarket] Kroger, so it was all geared to sexual activity,” Liedtke replied.
Wiggins asked about the shoes sold by Tokyo Valentino.
“They are not shoes [you'd] see on normal people walking around,” Liedtke replied, adding that although “they are not used for sex,” they are footwear “you’d see [on] strippers and ladies of the night.”
The policeman also described the shoes as “seductive in nature.”
“What about the lingerie?” Wiggins asked.
Sgt. Liedtke, whose main area of expertise appears to be military-grade weaponry and not ladies’ undergarments, classified it as “see-through.”
“It’s not lingerie you’d find at Target,” he added.
Today's East Cobb hearing to revoke the Tokyo Valentino license, now postponed to October 27, was allegdly convened because “the county said the top three categories of its inventory are toys, smoke products and lotions and sexual lubricants, which account for 70 percent of its stock,” the AJC reports.
