start reg ulating when and where adults can meet in privately owned spaces, you better have a damn good reason. The best argument against drifting over to Midtown in the middle of the night is the self-evident one: There’s a good chance you’ll spend too much of Saturday with your ashtray-scented head drooping over a cup of coffee while you lament the futility of your life. Fine. But that’s an argument to be made to your drunk friends who want to keep the party going at 2 a.m. — not one to be imposed on the public by city officials with a weird concern over our collective bedtime.
you’re not very willing, probably, to get up and get the kids off to school, or visit and spend time with the family. One thing we desperately need in this city and this state and this country is more family time.” Somebody go dig up Carrie Nation and retrieve her hatchet. As hard as it might be to believe, some people don’t even have kids. Even among those who do, the City Board isn’t going to fix or break the art of parenting by passing an ordinance to make sure mom and dad are in their PJs by 2:30 a.m. so they can spring out of bed the next morning to fix French toast. Good parenting is an issue that must be addressed by individuals and families, not by the edict of an elected official. But we digress.
SAVE THE NIGHT: Revelers at Elevations.
If a 2 a.m. closing time for clubs would make for a safer city, how about making an even safer one by closing everything down at midnight? Better yet, a blanket citywide curfew after dusk. Think of all the police resources that would be saved! Absurd? It follows from the same premise with which Adcock and her ilk begin: Public safety trumps free assembly. Crime is no joke, but neither is the First Amendment. The Founding Fathers probably weren’t envisioning the early morning dance f loor at Discovery when they articulated the right to assemble, but the g ist still sta nds. When you
4 Because legislating morality doesn’t work, and might actually hurt in this case. Witness the following quote from Adcock that Arkansas Times reporter David Ramsey collected back in January for a story he did on the push to shutter the late-night clubs: “Lots of people, when you go out and drink until 5 a.m., then you go home and
brian chilson
binge at the Isle of Capri. Or anyone who keeps the thermostat set at 78 in the winter and 65 in the summer. But while we may loudly complain about the things that offend our sensibilities, we’re not trying to pass laws prohibiting people from doing them unless there’s serious public harm at stake. If all this sounds a little libertarian ... well, it is. This attempt to close the 5 a.m. clubs is one of those cases where civil-liberties-minded folks from the left and the right should be able to find common ground. We don’t like the idea of being nannied for no good reason any more than Rand Paul does.
Better yet, a blanket citywide curfew after dusk. Think of all the police resources that would be saved! Absurd? It follows from the same premise with which Adcock and her ilk begin: Public safety trumps free assembly.
If the grand, national experiment of Prohibition and the 35-year boondoggle of the war on drugs have taught us nothing else, it’s that you can’t make people conform to a narrow view of morality with a gavel. Sure, as a good attorney told us once: All laws are moral laws in the end. But there’s a difference between making sure people don’t do outright evil by the rest of mankind, and using the law to make them do what you, personally, think is best for them. Here’s a radical idea: Having latenight clubs might actually keep Little Rock and its citizens safer. Your average politician and policeman are shaking their heads right now, clucking over our naivety. But bear with us. Continued on page 18 www.arktimes.com
August 14, 2014
17