STRIPPER AGE AND WEIGHT LIMITS?

Sophomoric Louisiana state House session was shamed into silence on Wednesday after a member proposed limiting the weight and age of erotic dancers in the state.

As discussion began on Wednesday of House Bill 468 — which would increase the age limit on strippers from 18 to 21 — it was clear from the cackling in the House chambers that male lawmakers were not taking the subject seriously.

After Rep. Walt Leger offered the bill, the first question came from Rep. Sam Jones.

“I appreciate you wanting to raise the minimum age,” Jones said. “Are you going to put a maximum age on that?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Leger smiled as members of the House laughed. “I’m not looking to comment on anybody’s tastes.”

The first amendment offered by Rep. Kenneth Havard did exactly that: It insisted that dancers be “between twenty-one and twenty-eight years of age and shall be no more that [SIC] one hundred sixty pounds in weight.”

“In the spirit of this legislative session, I will offer up this amendment as a part of keeping the spirit alive of trimming the fat,” Havard quipped, drawing more cackling from the male lawmakers.

However, Havard quickly withdrew the amendment after Rep. Nancy Landry asked him how he could “not find this offensive.”

But it was the scolding from Republican Rep. Julie Stokes that brought the lawmakers’ fun to an end.

“I’ve got to say, looking out over this body, I’ve never been more repulsed to be part of it,” she said, silencing her colleagues. “I’m going to tell you one thing, the disrespect — and I saw it in 2013 in committee, and I’ve never been so disgusted to be part of a committee as I was in 2013, somebody made comments, like, ‘What if it’s a classy strip club like Cheetah’s in Atlanta?’ That’s not the way we behave in this body.”

“I don’t even know what Representative Havard was thinking,” she continued. “That’s a dangerous thing to do politically. It was a bad idea.”

Stokes suggested that the male politicians “look around at their own bodies, and their own daughters.”

“I refuse the spirit of everything that I heard,” she said. “And I can’t even believe the behavior in here. I think we need to call an end to this. I hear derogatory comments about women in this place regularly. I hear and I see women get treated differently than men, and I’m going to tell you what, you gave me a perfect forum to talk about it right now.”

“Because it has got to stop,” Stokes added. “That was utterly disrespectful and disgusting. I really don’t have anything left to say.”

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STAFF WRITER

THOSE “GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS” ARE NEVER AROUND WHEN YOU NEED THEM

A bad guy with a gun opened fire at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana on Thursday night. As of this writing, two of his victims are dead and at least seven others are wounded. No good guy with a gun rose from the audience to fell the lone gunman as he pumped bullet after bullet into the innocent crowd. The man concluded his rampage by turning his handgun on himself and taking his own life.

Louisiana, the state where this occurred, has some of the weakest — if not the weakest — gun laws in the nation. To give just one example, Louisiana recently enacted an NRA-backed state constitutional amendment providing that “the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms is fundamental and shall not be infringed,” and that “any restriction on this right” will be met with maximal skepticism by the states’ courts. The amendment also stripped out language permitting the state legislature to “prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on a person.”

Similarly, Louisiana does not require gun dealers to obtain a state license. It does not limit the number of guns that may be purchased at one time. It forbids local governments from regulating firearms. And it has no laws restricting assault weapons or .50 caliber rifles. One study of all 50 states’ gun laws concluded that Louisiana has the laxest gun laws of any state.

The National Rifle Association claims that this absence of gun regulation is a good thing, in part, because it enables armed vigilantes to gun down murderers like the man who perpetrated the shooting in Lafayette. But the high rates of gun violence in Louisiana cut strongly against this conclusion. A 2013 report by the Center for American Progress examined all 50 states according to 10 factors related to gun violence. Louisiana received the worst rating of any state on several of these factors, including overall firearm deaths from 2001-2010, firearm homicides in 2010, and firearm homicides among women from 2001-2010. The report also rated Louisiana the worst state overall when all 10 factors were aggregated.

Nor is Louisiana, with its lax gun laws and high rates of gun violence, an outlier. To the contrary, the report concluded that “the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have a level of gun violence that is more than twice as high — 104 percent higher — than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.”

[Cross-posted from thinkprorgess]

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STAFF WRITER