Strip club ordinance does not make Chicago a world-class city

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West Side Ald. Emma Mitts (37^th) is pushing a new ordinance about booze in strip clubs that she says would make Chicago a “more world-class city.”

If so, this is a world to which Chicago need not belong. Honestly, people. Our city faces other enormous problems right now; the City Council needs to focus on them. The full Council should walk away from this one.

Currently, city officials say, Chicago strip clubs that feature dancers wearing “pasties” and barely-there panties can sell liquor or allow patrons to bring in their own booze.

But liquor is not allowed in strip clubs that feature fully nude dancers. The new ordinance would eliminate this restriction, says the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which opposes the proposal.

Under Mitts’ ordinance, not only could liquor be consumed in fully nude strip clubs, but partially nude establishments could try to convert to fully nude strip joints offering liquor. You can bet they would.

This proposed ordinance, then, encourages the expansion of a type of entertainment that exploits women; and it promotes a liquor-laden environment that heightens their chance of abuse by patrons.

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For decades, strip clubs have attracted unsavory elements. Back in the 1970s, the city’s Rush Street entertainment district was home to some one dozen strip clubs that served alcohol. At the time, the area was replete with prostitutes, according to one 2006 Illinois Supreme Court opinion on the topic.

Those clubs shut down after an anti-prostitution crackdown during the 1980s. What followed? An 80 percent decline in the area’s prostitution arrests.

We are surprised that another supporter of the Mitts’ ordinance, Finance Committee Chairman Ed Burke, does not seem to remember these days. Ald. Burke (14th) is a former Chicago Police officer with a fondness for Chicago history, yet he supported an unsuccessful 2014 variation on the Mitts’ ordinance.

At that time Burke said that as a “world-class city” Chicago should allow “realistic kinds of adult entertainment venues” as long as they didn’t create a “problem in the neighborhood.’’

But the Illinois Supreme Court has found that “where alcohol is served in establishments offering nude or seminude dancing … blight is frequently reported. Disturbances involving lascivious conduct, drunkenness, larcenies, assaults and narcotics are common.”

Mitts says her proposal would better regulate the strip club industry and “if it’s an industry and folks are doing it, who am I to judge?”

We don’t have to judge. We also don’t have to cheer it on.

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