Mayors foist their morality on others

To the editor:

The article "Owner of strip club calls it quits in Cape Girardeau" recounted how the club's owner, David Capps, fought to keep his strip club "a business of a type not likely to be welcomed by the religion-motivated of Cape Girardeau" open. The article featured gleeful comments by Cape's mayor and his predecessor about the club's recent self-exile.

I do not patronize places like Capps' recently departed strip club, but my reasons have nothing to do with following the lead of Cape's highly sanctified nosey-pokes. Jay Knudtson and Al Spradling remind me of the stickup man in a famous New Yorker cartoon who, while holding a pistol on the attendant in a theater-ticket kiosk, says, "The show is lousy. I want everybody's money back." My advice to everyone else who cannot resist the impulse of foisting his own conception of morality on the unwilling as well as the willing: If you do not approve of strip clubs, don't patronize them.

I do not doubt for a moment that Knudtson and Spradling can readily trot out a whole brothel of lawyers who will be glad to say that whatever those two plus the city council did to drive Capps out of Cape was perfectly legal. Was it seemly as well?

DONN S. MILLER, Tamms, Ill.