If some people have a hard time applying New York City’s experience with adult businesses to Northampton, let’s consider a situation in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a college town with a population of 22,000. Don Herzog, a professor at The University of Michigan Law School, writes on the blog Left2Right, on April 14, 2005…
A block and a half away from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, one town over from where I live, you can find The Magazine Rack. Despite the inauspicious name, the place is a porn shop…Read the complete post.
The place hit the local news last week when students from Ave Maria College launched a picket. The college, a Catholic school set up by a foundation funded by local boy made good, Tom Monaghan…is just as close to the porn shop as EMU is. Declared one picketing woman, a senior at Ave Maria, “Pornography is the root of a lot of social problems. It’s degrading to society. It’d be great if this place would close down, but all we can do is make people think about it.”
Meanwhile, a senior from EMU launched a counter-picket of his own, with help from fraternity and sorority members. “Dressed in a stylish black suit,” he stood in front of the store with a sign proclaiming, HONK IF YOU LOVE PORN! Ah, democracy. Ah, undergraduates.
Some other commercial firms in town are happy about the protest. The owner of a rental management company commented, “I don’t like having a dirty store in my neighborhood. It brings in low-life, nonfunctional people. I would like to see this street do well.” And the owner of a Mexican restaurant obligingly showed up with refreshments for the picketers. “I think when young people are concerned about community issues, you have to support them–they’re doing something good,” she said. “I have nothing against [The Magazine Rack], but no matter how nice it might be, it is not welcoming to the neighborhood. It attracts special characters.”
The Supreme Court has upheld zoning designed to exclude such businesses precisely because it lures those low-life, nonfunctional, special characters–more generally, because it lowers property values and attracts petty crime and prostitution, or because a municipality might reasonably think it does. And the Ave Maria picketers are exercising their freedom of speech, not violating the first amendment rights of The Magazine Rack. They can’t be violating the shop’s first amendment rights, because they’re private actors, not the government. The Bill of Rights protects only against state action.
Still, that senior with the counter-picket–no low-life he, in his stylish suit–is worried about the Constitution. “It’s an American right to watch and observe what you want to,” he said…
Me, I wouldn’t even try to outlaw porn. But I’m cheerfully with the Ave Maria protesters. The stuff doesn’t belong on a main pedestrian and shopping drag right by two campuses. Right, that means I think there’s more here than consumer demand, rent, and the free market, more than the bare fact that The Magazine Rack is a private firm located on private property suggests. There’s more to say on behalf of the picketers’ concerns than, “if you don’t like porn, don’t shop there,” or “if you don’t like seeing the store, don’t look at it.” Neighborhoods have characters, and those characters are properly matters of public concern. (A sympathetic economist might invoke the flabby category, externalities.) I’d be happy to have the city vigorously enforce the zoning rule and force the business to relocate. I’d be happy, too, if the picketers invested enough time and energy to embarrass some of the customers, depress demand, and drive the shop’s profits down to where they’d need to relocate, too. Either public or private action here could be coercive–and could still be legitimate.