Quote:
Originally Posted by After Shock Media
I seem to recall a marijuana stamp tax, a machine gun tax, and a few others that did not really legitimize those industries at all and were used to dismantle them and make them illegal.
I also do not like a tax on a given item as it associates it with an issue, aka sin tax. Alcohol causes deaths and health issues, cigarettes the same, gas causes pollution and uses roadways, and so forth. What does porn do to deserve a tax? We already pay for our bandwidth, we pay an income tax, we are small business owners as it is so please just leave us alone.
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The argument forwarded by people like
Charles Calderon is that porn businesses (brick and mortar businesses in particular) have "negative secondary effects," and the tax revenue would be put to use in ways that mitigate those secondary effects.
While I personally think that secondary effects arguments are extremely weak, it is an unfortunate fact that courts across this country have long accepted the secondary effects rationale as legitimate with respect to brick and mortar adult retail businesses (and other types of brick and mortar businesses as well), and they have placed the bar extremely low for municipalities that want to restrict the operation and location of such businesses.
Essentially, all a city has to do is present evidence that supports their contention that adult businesses do produce negative secondary effects, and then cite those findings within their zoning regulations. The evidence doesn't even have to be compelling at all -- I've seen many fundamentally flawed studies accepted by courts as evidence in zoning disputes. (Just ask attorneys like Luke Lirot in Fla, or Alan Begner in the Atlanta area; the hurdles that the city must clear with respect to their evidence of secondary effects is laughably low.)
This is why cities can dictate a broad range of operating conditions to adult businesses, like limitations on their operating hours, lighting requirements, rules regarding their exterior signs, etc., and the courts will typically uphold those regulations, so long as the city supplies
somewhere in town for local adult businesses to operate legally. That somewhere can be a mosquito infested swamp for all the court cares, so long as it can reasonably be considered part of the city in question.
Such secondary effects arguments haven't gone far with respect to online content, but I don't expect that legislators will stop trying to apply the same logic to online adult businesses any time soon.