Nevada- Scott Babb, 43, is packing it in.

Literally, Babb has closed the door for the last time to his place of retail business at Camelot Videos in the small shopping center next to Utilities Inc. on Humahuaca Street in Pahrump.

Babb told the Pahrump Valley Times that the recently passed county ordinance regulating sexually oriented businesses is irresponsible. In Pahrump for the past three years and three months, Babb plans to continue his line of clothing sales from his Web site, Damnnearnaked.com, where he hopes he will not have to put up with the county’s “over-regulation.”

“I can’t afford an attorney, so I couldn’t have one look at the ordinance or explain it to me. (Strip club owner Joe) Richards wanted me to join him in fighting it, but I was losing money on this.”

Babb’s 1,000-square-foot store mostly stocked pornographic videos and apparel. Signed posters of female porn stars covered his walls. Now they’ll be warehoused in his garage, he said. Women and children’s apparel, seemingly out of place, adds color and texture to the store’s décor, said Babbs, who added that clothing sales accounted for the largest part of his business.

One small poster pictured a nude Jody Moore, a former Playboy model and lesser-known porn star that now lives in Australia, hands covering her private parts. In her own handwriting, she sends her best wishes to “The Knight of Passion.”

“That was the name we were going to be, but we thought it was too risqué,” Babb said.

The Nye County commissioners passed the SOB ordinance twice, once in Tonopah, and then again in Pahrump after the first passage was found to be flawed.

The 30-page ordinance, prepared by the district attorney’s office, was presented publicly as a reasoned argument for preventing urban blight and protecting the health and safety of citizens.

“We don’t even have urban, let alone blight,” said Babbs pointing to the unpaved roads all around his store.

Sexually oriented business owners must pay a $5,000 application fee to Nye County, renewable annually with a $200 fee. The fee pays for the sheriff’s office to do an investigation. Then, owners have to pay $1,500 for the business license itself. Babb says the total of $6,700 for the privilege of operating in Nye County is more than he can bear.

“The bad thing about this ordinance is, it’s just going to put the small guy out of business,” he said last week. “The end effect of this ordinance is going to be the protection of The Kingdom Gentlemen’s Club and The Adult Superstore.” Smaller business owners will find the county’s fees prohibitive as business costs, he said.

The common perception of the ordinance is that the commissioners were motivated in passing it by the guise it afforded them for trying to close down Joe Richard’s all-nude strip bar, The Kingdom Gentlemen’s Club, on Highway 160 and Homestead Road.

“It’s the same as if they passed a law designed to ban all small retailers, and leave only Wal-Mart,” Babb said.

“Richards won’t close. If they take his liquor license away, he’ll sell pop or O’Doul’s (non-alcoholic beer) and lower the entrance age to 18. There are plenty of places in Las Vegas that don’t sell alcohol. They’re full of 18-year-old boys, and the people over 21 have already gotten tanked up on alcohol. The entertainment’s not going to stop just because the liquor’s not there.

“It’s (the commissioners’) job to find what is right for the community,” Babbs said. “To pull Richards’ liquor license is anti-community, because now with the age lowered (for legal entrance), these moms who don’t like their sons driving by looking at the pictures of women on billboards, how are they going to feel when their sons can go in there, thanks to the county commissioners?”

“It’s unintended consequences. They’re not thinking of it from a business point of view. They’re not forward in their thinking.

“(Commission Chairwoman) Candice Trummell told me, ‘The sooner Joe Richards is out of business the better it will be for Pahrump,” Babbs said.

Regarding Keith Markely, the pastor of New Hope Fellowship Church and the prime organizer of the petition drive behind getting the county to move on the ordinance, Babbs said the following: “He’s calling us literally terrorists by saying he received death threats. As long as you are vague, you can say anything you want. He didn’t say who, where or when. All he’s doing is blowing up his own self-importance.

“If he can say to his church, ‘I’m risking my life for the good of the community,’ that’s going to be more money in that bowl at the end of the day.

“It’s way too easy for five people to sit down and vote in whatever they want,” Babbs said of the commissioners’ action in passing the ordinance. “They can just say, ‘Sue us if we’re wrong. It might cost the county, but it doesn’t cost them anything. They vote in the most whacked out laws. And law is way too serious a thing to have five people just say, ‘OK, now it’s a law.’ It should be a broader process.”

Employees, too, have to get a license to work at the sexually oriented stores under the law. “The employees of these places only make $6 to $7 per hour,” Babbs said. “How can you expect them to come up with $200 for a license? That’s just mean.”

The phone rang, and Babbs responded, “No sir, we’re closed due to the new SOB ordinance.

“We’ve always been known as the lady-friendly store in town,” he said. Most of his customers are women, Babbs said. The clothing line attracts them: jeans, T-shirts with cocky expressions, Halloween costumes, shoes, and jewelry. “We have the best selection in town,” he said. “I always thought we had the least offensive store in town. We made sure we were community friendly as far as our (outside) store front.”

Babbs said he was sorry to have to close. “I wish I had opened a store like this when I was 21.” He operates Camelot with his wife and a few part-time employees.

“Women were our main customers,” he said. “A guy will go into a pig sty to rent porn, but a woman wants a nice place. The woman will buy $200 or $300 worth of clothes and maybe a sex toy, or special-order something off the side. A guy will rent a $4 video and go home.”

A man came to the door inquiring about whether Babbs was open.

“No, the county commissioners shut us down with the SOB ordinance,” he said.

“Jesus Christ!” the man said. “My daughter has a dance to go to and I was looking for some long gloves.”

Babbs tells him where else he might try. “If I were still open I would special-order him those gloves and probably stock them,” he said after the man left.

As for the antagonism to sex per se, Babbs said, “It makes no sense to me because it’s the most natural thing you can do. You can’t stop the sex drive of the human because it’s the same as food. Your instincts say to survive. You have to eat and protect your family. And by the way, you have to have sex to have a family – there’s no other way to do it.

“There’s a commandment not to commit adultery, but not one forbidding you to fornicate. I’m agnostic,” he said. “If there is a God, I’ll have some questions when I meet him. It makes you wonder, with all the terrible things going on in the world – terrorism, the Saddam genocide, Iraq, women being beheaded or stoned to death for taking off their scarf – and these guys (the county commissioners) are worried about people enjoying sex.”