FLASHPOINT for Sep 03, 2007

Monday, Sept. 3, 2007 | 12:57 p.m.

So is Nevada really the Wild West, where libertarians and libertines can do what they want? Or has the state become a puritanical bastion, where the freedoms of old are no longer the freedoms of now? Those questions come to mind in the wake of Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto's decision to attempt to reinstate, through an appeal to the 9th Circuit, a decades-old ban on brothel advertising, which was recently overturned by federal Judge Jim Mahan. This is a case where strange bedfellows (hard to avoid the puns here, folks) fought the ban - newspapers and brothels. Beyond spawning a raft of journalists-as-whores punch lines, the issue here is real, especially in a state where there is a city that has billboards racier than any brothel ad.

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