More Virginia Beach fascism

For a city promoted as a tourist destination, Virginia Beach sure doesn't like people having a good time. It used to be known as one of the region's fun centers, but I went there on a family trip around the time the city started cracking down in the name of making it "family-friendly" - which brang a bunker mentality to the whole vacation.

The police nearly busted one of my crew for an alleged curfew violation - even though it was on private property and the so-called "offender" was 18 anyway. All that just for playing hackeysack outside the hotel.

How can you be a resort town if the whole city is under lockdown at the crack of dusk? This proved Virginia Beach was becoming a Singapore on the Atlantic.

Now the right-wing tyranny continues in Virginia Beach as cops have seized 2 "obscene" advertising signs from a clothing store. It happened at an Abercrombie & Fitch shop, of all places! The murals were black-and-white photos that were so tame that the local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, published one of them with its online story on the raid.

Are they going to raid the Virginian-Pilot next?

The cops actually cited the clothing store manager on obscenity charges, if you can believe that, and now the manager faces a fine of up to $2,000 and a year in jail for displaying the murals that were shown in the newspaper without any trouble at all.

I still can't believe this happened to a preppy business like Abercrombie & Fitch! If Abercrombie & Fitch has this much trouble, think of the trouble that a thrift store that sells 1976 hand-me-downs to people of average means would be in if they displayed the same type of photos Abercrombie & Fitch did. If upscale stores aren't safe, who is?

Even more ironic, this raid happened at Lynnhaven Mall - where our tires were slashed on our trip. While the city is prosecuting stores for "dirty" advertising signs, car vandals roam the mall parking lot with impunity (which potentially put us at risk by almost causing us to try to drive on a flat).

The photos at the store were so tame that there's no way they'd meet the legal definition of obscenity or even pornography. Spammers can flood The People's Forum with photos or links that are way beyond anything that were on the store murals, but nobody bats an eye at them. Destroying a message board is considered "art", you see, and if someone who supports politicians who rail against smut has to spam hardcore pictures to pay the bills, their hypocrisy goes unchallenged.

The store murals were so mild, in fact, that prosecuting the store for them is no less extreme than prosecuting a significant percentage of people you see just walking down the street for the amount of skin they show.

Police claim the store was raided over citizen complaints. If that's the case, maybe the city listens too much to the "values voters." But with Virginia Beach's decline into tyranny, the city has probably become a magnet for the 20-percenters who think everyone's a criminal and that loitering should be a capital offense. The Bushists are exactly the types who'd complain about the murals being "obscene."

(Source: http://hamptonroads.com/node/452689)