We need to talk about Minneapolis, folks. Because while the rest of us are out here trying to pay our mortgages, keep our kids safe, and maybe — just maybe — drive through a major American city without getting carjacked, the Minneapolis City Council decided this week that what their city really needs is government-licensed sex clubs. Twelve to zero. Unanimous. Not a single dissenting vote. Every last one of them looked at a city that’s been bleeding residents since 2020 and said, “You know what’ll bring people back? Bathhouses.”
That’s right — the same city that tried to defund its own police department, the same city where George Floyd’s death kicked off a summer of burning buildings, the same city where violent crime has been a rolling disaster for half a decade — that city just unanimously voted to have staff draw up ordinances legalizing adult sex venues. Because nothing screams “we’ve got our priorities straight” like licensing establishments for anonymous hookups while your constituents are afraid to walk to the grocery store after dark.
Here’s what happened. On April 9th, all thirteen members of the Minneapolis City Council were asked to vote on sending four proposed ordinances to city staff for development. Twelve voted yes. One was absent. The ordinances would create a brand-new licensing framework for adult bathhouses, update zoning codes, rewrite health and sanitation rules around contagious diseases, and — this is my favorite part — carve out special exceptions to the city’s existing indecency laws so that these venues can legally operate. They’re not just opening the door. They’re ripping it off the hinges, installing mood lighting, and putting out a welcome mat.
The push comes from something called the “Safer Sex Spaces Coalition,” which is made up of activist groups like OutFront MN and the Aliveness Project. They’ve been lobbying for three years to overturn a 1988 ordinance that banned businesses facilitating what the law called “high-risk sexual conduct.” Their argument? The old law contains “stigmatizing language” that targeted same-sex partnerships and people with HIV and AIDS, and the ban has driven sex-related gatherings underground into “unsafe and inaccessible spaces.”
Now look — I understand the historical argument. The 1988 ban was passed during the AIDS crisis, and even the first openly gay council member in Minneapolis history, Brian Coyle, supported it at the time because people were dying. Coyle himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. That’s a real, tragic piece of history. But here’s the thing the coalition doesn’t want to talk about: repealing a 38-year-old public health ordinance and setting up a licensing regime for sex clubs are two very different things. You can update outdated language without rolling out the red carpet for commercial hookup parlors. One is a correction. The other is a lifestyle choice dressed up as civil rights.
Council President Elliott Payne — who spearheaded this whole effort — says they’ll model the regulations after San Francisco’s “extensive safety standards.” San Francisco. The city where you can’t walk three blocks without stepping over a needle or dodging human waste on the sidewalk. The city that spent years letting open-air drug markets operate with impunity. That’s the model. That’s where Minneapolis is getting its homework answers. If your urban planning strategy is “let’s be more like San Francisco,” you’ve already lost the plot.
Payne also made the argument that sex parties are already happening in Minneapolis, so they might as well regulate them for safety. Which is a fascinating piece of logic. Murders are already happening in Minneapolis too — should we just license those and make sure the knives are sanitized? The whole point of law is that some things are prohibited because a civilized society decided they should be. “It’s happening anyway” is not a governing philosophy. It’s a surrender.
Ward 10 representative Aisha Chughtai chimed in to say this is about addressing “decades of racist, homophobic, xenophobic policy and language.” Then she reportedly seemed “caught off guard” by how much attention the vote received. Let me translate that for you: she thought this would slide through quietly while nobody was watching, and now she’s shocked that regular Americans have opinions about their tax dollars funding a bureaucracy dedicated to licensing sex venues.
And let’s zoom out for a second, because this is a pattern we see over and over in Democrat-run cities. The basics are crumbling — crime, schools, infrastructure, cost of living — and instead of fixing any of it, the people in charge chase ideological pet projects that make activists happy and normal families pack their U-Hauls. Minneapolis lost population every single year from 2020 through 2024. Businesses have fled downtown. The police department is still struggling to recruit officers after the “defund” lunacy. But sure — let’s allocate city staff time and taxpayer resources to drafting a four-ordinance regulatory framework for bathhouses. That’ll turn things around.
Mayor Jacob Frey, for his part, says he “supports continuing to explore the issue.” Which is politician-speak for “I don’t want to be the one who kills it but I also don’t want my name on it.” Classic. The man who stood in front of a mob during the 2020 riots and got booed off the street for not being radical enough — even he’s trying to keep this one at arm’s length.
Here’s the bottom line, folks. We are watching a major American city — one that was once a genuinely nice place to live and raise a family — systematically dismantle every guardrail that separates functional governance from social experimentation. The people running Minneapolis don’t answer to families. They don’t answer to small business owners. They don’t answer to the cops who are still trying to hold the line. They answer to activist coalitions with three-word names and a list of demands.
And the worst part? Not a single council member voted no. Not one. In a city of 400,000 people, there wasn’t a single elected representative willing to stand up and say, “Maybe we should fix the crime problem before we start licensing sex clubs.” That tells you everything you need to know about who’s running Minneapolis — and who they’re running it for.