The Red Catholic

Earlier this month, the city of Dubuque announced an agreement with the owners of Dubuque’s soon to be former strip club, “The Office.” The agreement is for $30000, The Office will close on July 1, 2009 and will never open an adult entertainment facility there again. Questions have been raised by the Telegraph Herald Editorial Board and others about the heavy handed approach the City of Dubuque took in aggressively changing city ordinances to regulate the strip club and make it difficult to remain in business.

The city council needed to act aggressively to fix a zoning problem previous city councils had believed banned strip clubs from the city of Dubuque. The Office found a location and a loop hole in the zoning ordinances to allow them to build the strip club forcing the city council to act to protect the original intent of the existing zoning ordinances. The time to question the council was when they originally drafted the ordinances and not in their robust defense of the intent of this law.

The Dubuque City Council has done one thing that our state legislature failed to do; defend the law that a properly elected government body had put in place to prohibit certain acts. The Iowa Legislature failed to act to defend their own body’s law defining marriage between a man and a woman and should look to Dubuque for the courage to do so. Kind of ironic that Pat Murphy is from Dubuque…