How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing? (June 21, 1991)

June 21, 1991 | William Rehnquist

[ChessExpert]

So dancing nude is free speech but saying something about our thieving pirate politicians sixty days prior to an election is not?

It doesn’t make sense.

[SR 50]

If dancing nude is free speech, what are they trying to say?

[tpaine]

tdewey10;
There is no total incorporation.

Both the 14th Amendment & Article VI applies ~all~ of the Constitutions supreme law to ~all~ levels of government in the USA.
"Incorporaton doctrine" is a legalistic way to ignore 'politically incorrect' personal liberties.

tarkin:
Theoretically you're of course correct. But in fact each and every provision of the BoR was interpreted to be "implicit in the ordered concept of liberty" in the 1960s (when the SCOTUS practically overruled all case law involving the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment)

Justice Harlan said it best:

     "[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause `cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution.
This `liberty´ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property;
the freedom of speech, press, and religion;
the right to keep and bear arms;
the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. 
It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . .

Obviously, it is a "purposeless restraint" to ban nude dancing in a private club.

[rattrap]

There's one of those in Atlanta.

[rattrap]

Obviously, it is a "purposeless restraint" to ban nude dancing in a private club.

They usually remove the purposeless restraints by the second song.

[tpaine]

And that's also about the time the 'bluenosed' cops raid the joint because it isn't paying for protection.