Some Florida lawmakers want to reduce age to buy rifles, raise age to be stripper

In Florida, if you're as young as 18 you soon may be able to buy a rifle – but you won't be able to be an exotic dancer.

On the one hand, lawmakers want to tamp down sex trafficking. On the other, they want to protect the gun rights of young adults in rural areas, as one lawmaker explained, who "do a lot of bird hunting."

Of two bills now in the Florida House, one (HB 1379) would up the age to work in an adult entertainment business from 18 to 21.

The other (HB 1223) would reduce the age to purchase a “long gun,” like rifles and shotguns, from 21 to 18. The Legislature had raised that gun-buying age in 2018 after a 19-year-old shot and killed 17 people with an AR-15 in Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“It’s another contradiction,” said Rep. Ashley Gantt, one of only two Democratic lawmakers who voted against the age-raising legislation when it passed its first House committee on Thursday.

“It shows that it’s about their specific agenda and not about Floridians as a whole," she said. "We’re dictating what can and cannot be done, especially if it goes against their individual views, or whatever views they think are moral.”

'Open door for human trafficking and addictions'

“We're not talking about prohibiting adults to work in their area of preference, but rather saying that, if you're going to work at an adult entertainment industry establishment, specifically a strip club, you should not be under the age of 21,” said Rep. Carolina Amesty, R-Windermere, the sponsor of the age-raising bill.

“Let the record reflect that there are members in the Legislature that believe 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds should not work in the adult entertainment industry, which is an open door for human trafficking and addictions,” she added, speaking at the recent committee hearing.

Amesty – who did not respond to requests for comment – said that her vision “for young women of Florida is to not work in any adult entertainment establishments, but rather get an education, a career and (to) excel in life.”

Gantt, in a phone interview, said people who work at adult entertainment establishments already can do all that. Amesty, she said, “diminished" adults who choose to work in the field.

While adding that this proposed law affects all genders, she said she wondered if the legislation was "another governmental control of women's bodies," like recent abortion restrictions.

To be sure, the legislation doesn’t just affect strip clubs.

The employee age restriction applies to any “adult entertainment establishment,” which refers to adult bookstores and theaters, unlicensed massage establishments and “special cabarets.” (Those are, under state law, “any business that features persons who engage in specific sexual activities for observation by patrons, and which restricts or purports to restrict admission only to adults.”)

Despite questions of whether a court would uphold the age restriction, Amesty argued that it was constitutional because it was a “matter of public safety” and pointed to measures in Texas, Louisiana and Jacksonville that did similar things.

Another provision of the bill would make it a felony for someone to "knowingly" employ a worker younger than 21 at an adult entertainment establishment.

Amesty's bill must make it through the Senate before reaching Gov. Ron DeSantis' desk. The Senate version (SB 1690) is sponsored by Republican Sen. Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville, whose city recently implemented an age restriction for strippers.

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In the meantime, the long gun bill doesn't have a Senate companion. Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, said that it's a "non-starter." Federal law already prohibits people younger than 21 from buying handguns.

What's happening in Jacksonville?

After multiple years of litigation, a Jacksonville ordinance took effect last February after U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Corrigan upheld the decision to create a mandatory registration for performers and raise the minimum age.

But the litigation continues, with that decision under appeal.

Gary Edinger, a Gainesville-based First Amendment attorney who is representing Jacksonville clubs that filed suit against the measure, said he found the passage of the local law “irresponsible.”

He’s expecting the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in on the case – Wacko's Too, Inc., et al v. City of Jacksonville – in the next couple of months. The lawsuit notably alleges that the restrictions violate the First Amendment rights of adult performers who are not yet 21.

“I don't know why the Legislature wouldn't just pause a beat to find out (from the courts) if this kind of regulation is lawful or not,” Edinger said.

Texas’ law is similar to Florida’s legislation in that it applies to other “sexually-oriented businesses,” like adult movie theaters. It’s under appeal, too, with a decision expected soon.

While Louisiana’s was upheld, Edinger pointed to otherdecisions that went the other way.

In summary, the case law is “unsettled,” he said.

“If the (strip club) plaintiffs lose this case then the lesson that could be taken away is it’s OK to regulate the First Amendment rights of adult citizens as long as they’re younger than 21,” Edinger said, explaining his views on the implications of the ruling.

Like in Jacksonville, the Florida legislation is geared at preventing human trafficking. But Edinger said despite that city ordinance being geared toward preventing trafficking, “it only affects the constitutional rights of dancers or people working in adult establishments.”

Amesty told Gantt during the hearing that she’d be “more than happy to share with your office specific data that supports that 21 years of age.”

Yet, during the Jacksonville litigation, it came out that “no arrest for human trafficking has ever been made in an exotic dance establishment” in that city, according to court records.

But it did have the effect of putting people out of jobs.

A Jacksonville pole dancing instructor who goes by the stage name of "Ellie" said in an Instagram message that the law didn’t affect her personally as much as it did her coworkers because she was over 21 when it passed.

But Ellie, who teaches many exotic dancers, added that it left Jacksonville clubs short staffed and put women out of work.

“They put the law in place saying it was to ‘protect’ the women working against sex trafficking, but in my opinion as well as others, it only made it worse," the 24-year-old dancer said. "They just took these girls' jobs away without warning.”

One advocate's perspective

Jacksonville has only 15 of Florida's approximately 200 strip clubs, according to the online Ultimate Strip Club List.

Amesty's bill is "not going to have any impact on the social issues of domestic violence, exploitation, human trafficking, any of those kinds of things,” said Alex Andrews, executive program director of Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, which supports incarcerated sex workers. “What it is going to do is impact the people working there.”

Hundreds of people lost their jobs when Texas put in place its age restriction a couple of years ago, Andrews said.

The people who would lose their jobs “may have a lot of difficulty meeting their obligations.” And, if someone is being exploited, this move may just worsen their situation if they are being exploited, making "vulnerable people more vulnerable," Andrews added.

“The person who is exploiting them doesn’t just say, ‘Oh, OK, well let’s go get you that job at Starbucks then,’ ” she said. “They want them to engage in riskier behavior in order to meet the needs. So if someone is experiencing exploitation, changing the age limit on someone going to work at a strip club, it’s only going to put them in more danger.”

For Gantt, it’s not just the adult entertainment bill and the gun bill that are contradictions. She pointed to how the Florida House Republican majority pushed a bill last week that peels back child labor restrictions.

It allows 16- and 17-year-old children to work more than 40 hours a week and would allow homeschooled and virtual school teens to work during the school day. It also bars municipalities from enacting curfews that would conflict with the bill and lets teens work more than eight hours a day between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m.

“It’s just really crazy and contradictory how we are rolling back child labor laws, and letting kids be exploited by adults without any type of guardrails,” Gantt said. “But then we tell adults they can’t have freedom to work or be in the adult entertainment industry.”

Alexandria Mansfield of the Florida Times-Union contributed. This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. On X: @DouglasSoule.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida may lower age to buy rifles, raise age to be stripper