Columnist Susan Snyder: Standards? Make it a double

Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003 | 8:33 a.m.

In the past week:

Las Vegas City Council members considered an ordinance that would restrict anyone from drinking packaged liquor within 1,000 feet "of a church, synagogue, public or private school, hospital, drug treatment center or homeless shelter."

Clark County's planning agency called "obscene" a billboard overlooking the freeway connector to McCarran International Airport. The billboard, removed last week because its contract was up anyhow, depicted a topless woman holding a pair of dice to conceal her nipples.

And in Carson City, a computer specialist was fired from the Nevada Department of Corrections because he and his wife took an acting gig portraying a pair of customers at a Nevada brothel for an HBO special. James Wood was within a week of finishing his yearlong state probationary period but was let go for engaging in "inappropriate activity."

It's amazing what survives in a vacuum.

We don't want to lower the legal intoxication threshold of a drunk driver who plows his SUV into a school bus. But we sure don't want him drinking a beer near a school.

We put half-naked women on taxicabs that drive all over town and promote the sex industry as a regular part of our tourism. We even partially cover some dancers so certain performances of topless shows can be marketed as "family entertainment." Yet, we find fault with one billboard selling that kind of fun.

And one of our state agencies fires an employee who had his supervisor's permission to pretend to be a customer of a brothel -- a legal Nevada business -- while the state rakes in money from brothel fees and licensing. A study from the mid-1990s estimated the brothel industry pumped $10 million into public coffers annually.

Nevada in general, and Las Vegas in particular, has sold itself to the world as a place to let loose, have fun and act as you never would back in Toledo.

You can openly ogle women, drink for free while you throw money into an idiot machine and generally be as much of a pig as you want to be because, hey, it's only for the weekend.

We want you to have fun. We want your money.

We want our daughters fairly regulated when they lap-dance, but we don't want to see billboards telling the world they're doing it.

We want to promote imbibing for fun -- the proposed liquor restrictions wouldn't apply to the casino resort corridor. But don't do it in front of our kids. The liquor restrictions mostly would affect homeless people, as did the recent crackdown on pedestrians ticketed for improper street-crossings downtown. We don't want to help them. And we don't want tourists to see them.

We want to fire our state employees for taking advantage of an industry our state condones and profits from but wants to hide.

The legacy of such double standards provides pretty thin cover.

In the same week officials sought to downplay the dirty parts of our tourism industry, the national Children's Advocacy Alliance gave Nevada failing grades in its rates of suicide, drug-abuse, lack of prenatal care, numbers of children with no health insurance and rates of teen pregnancy and high school dropouts.

We're not fooling anybody, except maybe ourselves.