I got to spend tonight at a meeting of the Tempe city council, invited by my friend Mike for a public hearing on the fate of Nita's Hideaway.

Nita's Hideaway is a rundown dump of a place that also happens to be just about the best club in the Phoenix area for all manner of live music, from singer-songwriter shows with 20 people in the audience, to bluegrass, to punk and all points in between.

It also sits on a plot of land the city of Tempe wishes to redevelop. So they looked into places to move. There's an old, defunct steak house not far from where my father lives in east Tempe (wherein also used to reside a gay bar, incidentally) that the owner of Nita's identified as the ideal place. Big enough that he could expand and hold his larger shows indoors instead of in the parking lot, it also has easy freeway access and sits in the middle of a dying strip mall that would finally see some life again.

Neighbors and churchgoers got wind of it (there's a Baptist church and school across a major street and behind a couple of buildings away from it, but they apparently feel threatened by the proximity). Much drama is ensuing.

Tonight's speakers ran the gamut from "think about the children! The CHILDREN!" weepers to bouncers from the club to cranky old people who think their lives are suddenly going to become a hailstorm of bullets, beer bottles and abuse from Nita's-goers who will be driving recklessly and drunk through the neighborhood.

Nita's patrons are, by and large, music lovers, and as such tend not to be dramatically alcoholic, violent or loud. The site is already zoned for commercial use. The nearest houses are hundreds of yards away, and it's likely the the noise from the adjoining freeway is louder than will be any music coming from the establishment. The way the traffic flow is structured, it's nigh-impossible that any Nita's patrons would accidentally find themselves in the residential area on its streets, as well as highly unlikely that anyone who didn't actually live in the neighborhood would purposely drive in there.

It seemed largely like the fundies were trying to ground their crusade to kill artistic expression and the consumption of alcoholic beverages in platitudes others would be more likely to listen to, and they trotted out Boy Scouts, little girls with Bibles, the old folk with their walkers. All the men on that side of the issue wore neatly-pressed shirts and ties. Perhaps it's cynical of me to see this as manipulation, but it struck me as most disingenuous.

By and large, their arguments reminded me of my college speech class on logical fallacies -- straw men, false dichotomies, specious arguments, etc., etc.

And in the end, they'll probably win and Nita's will go away.

One down and depressingly few to go before Phoenix is one big, quiet, uneventful suburb. And art and music will suffer.

And as a corollary, I just wanna say I think stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote.