Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc.

Justice Souter,

concurring in the judgment.

Not all dancing is entitled to First Amendment protection as expressive activity. This Court has previously categorized ballroom dancing as beyond the Amendment’s protection, Dallas v. Stanglin, 490 U. S. 19, 24-25 (1989), and dancing as aerobic exercise would likewise be outside the First Amendment’s concern. But dancing as a performance directed to an actual or hypothetical audience gives expression at least to generalized emotion or feeling, and where the dancer is nude or nearly so the feeling expressed, in the absence of some contrary clue, is eroticism, carrying an endorsement of erotic experience. Such is the expressive content of the dances described in the record.

Although such performance dancing is inherently expressive, nudity per se is not. It is a condition, not an activity, and the voluntary assumption of that condition, without more, apparently expresses nothing beyond the view that the condition is somehow appropriate to the circumstances. But every voluntary act implies some such idea, and the implication is thus so common and minimal that calling all voluntary activity expressive would reduce the concept of expression to the point of the meaningless. A search for some expression beyond the minimal in the choice to go nude will often yield nothing: a person may choose nudity, for example, for maximum sunbathing. But when nudity is combined with expressive activity, its stimulative and attractive value certainly can enhance the force of expression, and a dancer’s acts in going from clothed to nude, as in a striptease, are integrated into the dance and its expressive function. Thus I agree with the plurality and the dissent that an interest in freely engaging in the nude dancing at issue here is subject to a degree of First Amendment protection.

I also agree with the plurality that the appropriate analysis to determine the actual protection required by the First Amendment is the four-part enquiry described in United States v. O’Brien, 391 U. S. 367 (1968), for judging the limits of appropriate state action burdening expressive acts as distinct from pure speech or representation. I nonetheless write separately to rest my concurrence in the judgment, not on the possible sufficiency of society’s moral views to justify the limitations at issue, but on the State’s substantial interest in combating the secondary effects of adult entertainment establishments of the sort typified by respondents’ establishments.

It is, of course, true that this justification has not been articulated by Indiana’s Legislature or by its courts. As the plurality observes, “Indiana does not record legislative history, and the State’s highest court has not shed additional light on the statute’s purpose,” ante, at 568. While it is certainly sound in such circumstances to infer general purposes “of protecting societal order and morality . . . from [the statute’s] text and history,” ibid., I think that we need not so limit ourselves in identifying the justification for the legislation at issue here, and may legitimately consider petitioners’ assertion that the statute is applied to nude dancing because such dancing “encourag[es] prostitution, increases] sexual assaults, and attracts] other criminal activity.” Brief for Petitioners 37.

This asserted justification for the statute may not be ignored merely because it is unclear to what extent this purpose motivated the Indiana Legislature in enacting the statute. Our appropriate focus is not an empirical enquiry into the actual intent of the enacting legislature, but rather the existence or not of a current governmental interest in the service of which the challenged application of the statute may be constitutional. Cf. McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420 (1961). At least as to the regulation of expressive conduct,¹ “[w]e decline to void [a statute] essentially on the ground that it is unwise legislation which [the legislature] had the undoubted power to enact and which could be reenacted in its exact form if the same or another legislator made a ‘wiser’ speech about it.” O'Brien, supra, at 384. In my view, the interest asserted by petitioners in preventing prostitution, sexual assault, and other criminal activity, although presumably not a justification for all applications of the statute, is sufficient under O’Brien to justify the State’s enforcement of the statute against the type of adult entertainment at issue here.

At the outset, it is clear that the prevention of such evils falls within the constitutional power of the State, which satisfies the first O’Brien criterion. See 391 U. S., at 377. The second O’Brien prong asks whether the regulation “furthers an important or substantial governmental interest.” Ibid. The asserted state interest is plainly a substantial one; the only question is whether prohibiting nude dancing of the sort at issue here “furthers” that interest. I believe that our cases have addressed this question sufficiently to establish that it does.

In Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U. S. 41 (1986), we upheld a city’s zoning ordinance designed to prevent the occurrence of harmful secondary effects, including the crime associated with adult entertainment, by protecting approximately 95% of the city’s area from the placement of motion picture theaters emphasizing “‘matter depicting, describing or relating to “specified sexual activities” or “specified anatomical areas” ... for observation by patrons therein.’” Id., at 44. Of particular importance to the present enquiry, we held that the city of Renton was not compelled to justify its restrictions by studies specifically relating to the problems that would be caused by adult theaters in that city. Rather, “Renton was entitled to rely on the experiences of Seattle and other cities,” id., at 51, which demonstrated the harmful secondary effects correlated with the presence “of even one [adult] theater in a given neighborhood.” Id., at 50; cf. Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50, 71, n. 34 (1976) (legislative finding that “a concentration of ‘adult’ movie theaters causes the area to deteriorate and become a focus of crime”); California v. LaRue, 409 U. S. 109, 111 (1972) (administrative findings of criminal activity associated with adult entertainment).

The type of entertainment respondents seek to provide is plainly of the same character as that at issue in Renton, American Mini Theatres, and LaRue. It therefore is no leap to say that live nude dancing of the sort at issue here is likely to produce the same pernicious secondary effects as the adult films displaying “specified anatomical areas” at issue in Renton. Other reported cases from the Circuit in which this litigation arose confirm the conclusion. See, e. g., United States v. Marren, 890 F. 2d 924, 926 (CA7 1989) (prostitution associated with nude dancing establishment); United States v. Doerr, 886 F. 2d 944, 949 (CA7 1989) (same). In light of Renton's recognition that legislation seeking to combat the secondary effects of adult entertainment need not await localized proof of those effects, the State of Indiana could reasonably conclude that forbidding nude entertainment of the type offered at the Kitty Kat Lounge and the Glen Theatre’s “bookstore” furthers its interest in preventing prostitution, sexual assault, and associated crimes. Given our recognition that “society’s interest in protecting this type of expression is of a wholly different, and lesser, magnitude than the interest in untrammeled political debate,” American Mini Theatres, supra, at 70, I do not believe that a State is required affirmatively to undertake to litigate this issue repeatedly in every case. The statute as applied to nudity of the sort at issue here therefore satisfies the second prong of O’Brien.²

The third O’Brien condition is that the governmental interest be “unrelated to the suppression of free expression,” 391 U. S., at 377, and, on its face, the governmental interest in combating prostitution and other criminal activity is not at all inherently related to expression. The dissent contends, however, that Indiana seeks to regulate nude dancing as its means of combating such secondary effects “because . . . creating or emphasizing [the] thoughts and ideas [expressed by nude dancing] in the minds of the spectators may lead to increased prostitution,” post, at 592, and that regulation of expressive conduct because of the fear that the expression will prove persuasive is inherently related to the suppression of free expression. Ibid.

The major premise of the dissent’s reasoning may be correct, but its minor premise describing the causal theory of Indiana’s regulatory justification is not. To say that pernicious secondary effects are associated with nude dancing establishments is not necessarily to say that such effects result from the persuasive effect of the expression inherent in nude dancing. It is to say, rather, only that the effects are correlated with the existence of establishments offering such dancing, without deciding what the precise causes of the correlation actually are. It is possible, for example, that the higher incidence of prostitution and sexual assault in the vicinity of adult entertainment locations results from the concentration of crowds of men predisposed to such activities, or from the simple viewing of nude bodies regardless of whether those bodies are engaged in expression or not. In neither case would the chain of causation run through the persuasive effect of the expressive component of nude dancing.

Because the State’s interest in banning nude dancing results from a simple correlation of such dancing with other evils, rather than from a relationship between the other evils and the expressive component of the dancing, the interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression. Renton is again persuasive in support of this conclusion. In Renton, we held that an ordinance that regulated adult theaters because the presence of such theaters was correlated with secondary effects that the local government had an interest in regulating was content neutral (a determination similar to the “unrelated to the suppression of free expression” determination here, see Clark v. Community for Creative NonViolence, 468 U. S. 288, 298, and n. 8 (1984)) because it was “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech.” 475 U. S., at 48 (emphasis in original). We reached this conclusion without need to decide whether the cause of the correlation might have been the persuasive effect of the adult films that were being regulated. Similarly here, the “secondary effects” justification means that enforcement of the Indiana statute against nude dancing is “justified -without reference to the content of the regulated [expression],” ibid. (emphasis omitted), which is sufficient, at least in the context of sexually explicit expression,³ to satisfy the third prong of the O’Brien test.

The fourth O’Brien condition, that the restriction be no greater than essential to further the governmental interest, requires little discussion. Pasties and a G-string moderate the expression to some degree, to be sure, but only to a degree. Dropping the final stitch is prohibited, but the limitation is minor when measured against the dancer’s remaining capacity and opportunity to express the erotic message. Nor, so far as we are told, is the dancer or her employer limited by anything short of obscenity laws from expressing an erotic message by articulate speech or representational means; a pornographic movie featuring one of respondents, for example, was playing nearby without any interference from the authorities at the time these cases arose.

Accordingly, I find O’Brien satisfied and concur in the judgment.

1 Cf., e. g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578 (1987) (striking down state statute on Establishment Clause grounds due to impermissible legislative intent).

2 Because there is no overbreadth challenge before us, we are not called upon to decide whether the application of the statute would be valid in other contexts. It is enough, then, to say that the secondary effects rationale on which I rely here would be open to question if the State were to seek to enforce the statute by barring expressive nudity in classes of productions that could not readily be analogized to the adult films at issue in Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U. S. 41 (1986). It is difficult to see, for example, how the enforcement of Indiana’s statute against nudity in a production of “Hair” or “Equus” somewhere other than an “adult" theater would further the State’s interest in avoiding harmful secondary effects, in the absence of evidence that expressive nudity outside the context of Renton-type adult entertainment was correlated with such secondary effects.

3 I reach this conclusion again mindful, as was the Court in Renton, that the protection of sexually explicit expression may be of lesser societal importance than the protection of other forms of expression. See Renton, supra, at 49, and n. 2, citing Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50, 70 (1976).