Columnist Susan Snyder: Please define 'legal' and 'acceptable'

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at [email protected] or 259-4082.

Residents leading the most recent charge to ban brothels in Nye County say they're afraid their children will grow up thinking prostitution is acceptable because it's legal.

Never knew the two were synonymous.

But if they are, why target only hookers? Let's outlaw everything that's not acceptable for children. It would make it a whole lot easier on parents. They wouldn't be forced to teach their kids how to make choices based on what's right, rather than what's legal.

"Legal" makes choices easy. The other way takes courage.

So what would we ban?

I'd start with Barbie. Vegetarians could ban Happy Meals. Anti-gun advocates could take away water pistols. And clean-air advocates likely would want to park those family ATVs and jet boats.

Hmmm, seems to get a little hairy when we start trying to legislate what's acceptable for everybody, doesn't it?

Still, members of Citizens Against Prostitution know what's best for their kids and everyone else. They're circulating petitions in hopes of placing the issue on the November ballot.

The group's leader, Chris Nagel, didn't return a phone message left at his home. But Nagel and other members of his group have said they object to being placed in a position where they have to answer questions their kids ask about these businesses.

See, if there were no brothels, then the kids could avoid hearing about them until they were old enough to leave home and decide to check one out on their own. Better to let them wing it later than to discuss it now so they know where their family stands on the issue.

One Pahrump landscape business owner, who has lived in Southern Nevada her whole life, says the brothel bickering separates old-timers from newcomers.

Natives pretty much accept that brothels are legal, she says. Few gripe when the tour buses bring loads of people to town who want to cruise past a brothel and giggle.

"You'll see five or six bus loads of them -- Germans, Asians, you name it -- in the Smith's Food King lot all at once," the resident said.

But the pious Pahrumpians aren't alone in trying to create a perfect place. We're putting our neon trademarks in a museum and putting everything but mouse ears on the Strip. About the only difference between us and the Disney Dynasty is they have an admission gate, and we have casinos.

Floridians push for casino gambling nearly every legislative session. And at least one major Strip resort calls its 8,000 employees "cast members" -- the term Disney applies to every park worker from Donald Duck to toilet cleaners.

Pahrump's subdivisions are spreading like a rash, and so is the move to homogenize Southern Nevada. Before you know it, we'll be Wisconsin with palm trees.

But we'll all be able to take comfort in knowing that no matter where we go to live or play we'll be able to find the exact same restaurants, the exact same stores and the exact same values.

We won't be bothered by making choices or teaching kids how to make them. We'll all be very safe.

And very boring.

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