NEW YORK -- Ron comes to the city about twice a month from Maryland. He likes to go to the same topless bar downtown after dinner to unwind a little, he says, or less frequently, to a peep show on Eighth Avenue on his way back to his hotel.
Part of the ritual is curiosity, he said. Another part is that he feels a little more daring in New York than when he's at home.
"Nothing wrong with it, and I think it's my own business," said Ron, a 43-year-old lawyer who declined to give his last name. "This is America. . . . This is New York."
But those sex-related, adult establishments that make him feel daring have become the business of community groups, politicians and business organizations who see them as nothing more than a blight on the city.
They say they hurt property values and encourage crime.
Their opponents sound a lot like Ron: This is New York. This is America. This is no place for censorship; that's unconstitutional.
"This is so much more of a cosmopolitan area, and there is no common morality," said Richard Kunis, owner of a Manhattan store that sells and rents X-rated movies.
"There is common respect. What one person finds entertaining, others find offensive, but these are just words and pictures, and who is it for the government to come in and say that you can't watch something you find entertaining," he said. "New York has always been a censorship-free city."
If Mr. Kunis blames the government, it is because the leading crusader in this war on sex stores is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who got elected last year on the promise to tackle problems he lumped together as "quality-of-life issues."
In the past 11 months, Mr. Giuliani's quality-of-life evangelism has meant running the squeegee men out of the Bowery, throwing panhandlers off the subway and flooding Greenwich Village with police on weekend nights to make sure drunken youths don't urinate into basement apartments or play their radios too loud.
The mayor's effort has gained him widespread praise.
Now he has turned to sex shops. He wants them out.
But, Mr. Kunis objects, "What about the quality of sex lives? That's part of life, too."
Mr. Giuliani has proposed restricting to industrial areas all the bars, stores and theaters that offer sexually oriented entertainment -- distancing them from residential neighborhoods and commercial districts.
So far, the proposal includes no grandfather clause that would allow established stores to stay. And while the city Planning Department staff is busy developing guidelines for the new zoning proposals, the City Council has passed a moratorium that prohibits any of those sex-related business from opening or expanding in the city for one year. The prohibition is absolute.
The whole idea has angered many sex shop operators, their customers and some civil libertarians. Already, the New York Civil Liberties Union is poised to file a lawsuit.
While the city cannot restrict access to the sex shops, it can regulate them. The shops can, for example, be closed if the businesses are having an adverse effect on the surrounding community -- the crime rate and the property values being the two most critical indicators.
"We think that the city's case is weak and not persuasive," said Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, countered that her group has evidence that along the 10 blocks of Eighth Avenue with the highest concentration of adult establishments, crime rates are higher and property values lower than other blocks in the neighborhood.
Ms. Dykstra praised the part of the proposed new regulations that would bar adult establishments from operating within 500 feet of each other.
"That is the thing that is really harmful -- the sheer number and the sheer concentration," she said. "So wherever these businesses end up, you will not have that harmful concentration."
The new zoning proposals are expected to go before the city Planning Commission sometime next month.