The Seattle Mariners are considering a lawsuit to prevent a new Déjà Vu strip club from opening a half-block south of Safeco Field, despite a decision by the city to grant the club a permit. The team has until Christmas Day to sue.

The Mariners argue that the strip club shouldn't be allowed near the stadium under a 2007 city law that prohibits adult cabarets within 800 feet of community centers, parks, and certain spots where kids congregate. (The legislation came in response to a federal court ruling that an 18-year citywide "moratorium" on strip clubs constituted an illegal ban.) The city found that the stadium was a "spectator sports facility," not a park or community center, and issued the permit on December 4.

"The city has taken every single one of the Mariners' arguments and said they are wrong," says Déjà Vu attorney Peter Buck. "A judge no longer has to ponder how the city would respond to these things."

As a homo, I had never set foot in a strip club. So, to see the harm these things are doing to the children, I chose a club near a place where lots of kids congregate: the Déjà Vu across the street from Pike Place Market. Standing on First Avenue, I watched a horse pull a carriage loaded with three kids past a 15-foot-tall pair of backlit legs in fishnet stockings. But the kids didn't look. They didn't point. They apparently didn't even notice.

Upstairs, a woman shook her nether-parts in my general direction. The strippers on the dimly lit stage were bottomless and so was my cup of orange Fanta (alcohol isn't allowed in Washington strip clubs). Large men in larger coats looked on as naked and nearly naked women made the rounds offering lap dances like friendly waitresses pouring refills of coffee. I chatted with a blond stripper who had a kid 11 months ago. The crowd was calm, the bouncers were cool, and zero children were inside. It occurred to me: The opposition to this place isn't about the harm it might do to kids inside; it's about the moral high ground of adults outside.

And the Mariners are standing on very low high ground. In May, Mariners manager John McLaren told the AP, "I think they brought a stripper in the clubhouse" to distract the players from their lousy record.

So strippers are okay in the clubhouse but not down the block from home plate.

Meanwhile, during games, Safeco Field is brimming with cups of beer and draped in a 360-degree assault of ads for booze. "If they are worried about morality, they should be worried about excessive use of alcohol in front of children," says Buck. The Mariners also have no problem with the women who chug beer and flash their breasts at bars like Sluggers across the street—and the drunk men who ogle them. But when it comes to strip clubs—which, frankly, aren't much different than places like Sluggers—the Mariners cry foul, not wanting to admit that the fans who pack Safeco Field are the same folks who might buy a lap dance after the game.

Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale couldn't explain exactly how a strip club would hurt the team or fans. "The city has laid it out very clearly," she says, referring to the 2007 city law regulating strip clubs. According to a city analysis that accompanied that ordinance: "There is some evidence that the presence of adult uses may correspond with increased levels of crime in an area, including sex-related crimes such as prostitution." But that evidence is based solely on reports from other cities.

"There was no compelling evidence that the few strip clubs in Seattle showed a disproportionate level of illegal activity or citations" for prostitution or drug dealing, says former city council member Peter Steinbrueck, who sponsored the 2007 legislation.

Indeed, according to a 2006 study of crime associated with Seattle strip clubs conducted by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, "Crime does not tend to accompany, concentrate around, or be aggravated by the adult businesses."

Nonetheless, any time someone proposes opening a strip club, the morality police scream that it doesn't belong in their neighborhood. But the Mariners' neighborhood, Sodo, is about as un-neighborhood-like as Seattle gets. If not there—on the brink of industrial lands—then where?