The dissenting judges may have made up for that poorly-veiled jab with this logical observation which so astutely points out that as the law is currently written, whether tits are involved in the dance or not, it's still a dance:

The people who paid these admission charges paid to see women dancing. It does not matter if the dance was artistic or crude, boring or erotic. Under New York’s Tax Law, a dance is a dance.

Tell that to anyone who has been to one of those awful clubs along the freeway where the girls are too tranqued out to move. Anyhoo…

"The majority implies that since the Legislature did not exclude from the entertainment tax other lowbrow forms of entertainment, such as baseball games and animal acts … it would not have wanted to exclude pole dancing; but the issue is not what the Legislature would have wanted to do, but what it did," Judge Robert Smith wrote.

Smith admitted to being "stuffy enough to find it distasteful" but said that it would be unconstitutional to discriminate on a business solely based on just how stuffy he is:

Perhaps for similar reasons, I do not read Hustler magazine; I would rather read the New Yorker. I would be appalled, however, if the State were to exact from Hustler a tax that the New Yorker did not have to pay, on the ground that what appears in Hustler is insufficiently “cultural and artistic.” That sort of discrimination on the basis of content would surely be unconstitutional. It is not clear to me why the discrimination that the majority approves in this case stands on any firmer constitutional footing.

Sorry, girls, the New Yorker wins today. Even though we know it's entirely acceptable in our society to read both.

Nite Moves was originally assessed $124,000 in tax due, which is a hell of a lot of lap dances for those of you doing the math.