Olympia Report: Strippers, Guns and Protection
Your local bar might someday feature hot naked people, if we’re reading the fine print properly on the strippers-rights bill signed this week by Gov. Jay Inslee.
One of the original premises of Senate Bill 6105 by Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, was that Washington should repeal its ban on alcohol in strip clubs because the current booze-free system makes the dancers the main source of profit, thus rendering an already exploitative business even more exploitative. The current law also makes the clubs less profitable, which means there are a relative handful compared to states with looser rules. (We’re looking at you, Oregon.)
The final version of the bill—which is mostly a beefed-up set of workplace protections for dancers—gets at the liquor license problem by requiring the Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) to repeal WAC 314-11-050, otherwise known as the “prohibited conduct” or “lewd conduct” rule. That would allow existing strip clubs to seek liquor licenses.
There was broad support for tossing that rule anyway because it was recently used to justify some ill-advised raids of gay bars in Seattle by the LCB and the city’s police, which deeply angered the increasingly powerful LGBTQ caucus in the Legislature. Also, the rule is kinda staid, antiquated, and weird.¹
https://www.postalley.org/2024/03/28/olympia-report-strippers-guns-and-protection/