Of course! Sandra Fluke needs a real job.
While I personally can't see anything wrong with legalizing prostitution, I can't see any major benefit either. If prostitution were not only legal, but considered like any other normal legal business, I would not want to see men and women looking for work be penalized for turning down work in a whorehouse either. Can't you see some whore trade school popping up and advertising on television!
Will whores be allowed to discriminate? Suppose a whore doesn't want to engage in acts with the same sex. Are they punished? Will their license be revoked? What's to be done with street wakers who don't want to keep books and pay taxes? Now they are picked up for solicitation, kept until morning and let go. After licensing they could be prosecuted for tax evasion. What about the casual hooker? The woman who just wants to pay the rent, she ran short, turning a few tricks once in a while bridges the gap. Does SHE need a license for part time whoring? Will a licensed whore who teaches kindergarten during the day keep her job? How about minors? Will a 15 year old boy with Daddy's credit card get to go to a legal brothel or is he still limited to the next door neighbor.
This is one of those things that looks good on paper but doesn't work as well in real life. The best that can be said is that there will be legal brothels AND all the problems with illegal prostitiution that we have now.
Well I could think of a few benefits of legalizing the business, for starters we will take the business away from the pimps and gangsters on the street, and be able to get these girls cleaned up, alot of the street walkers are beaten regularly and get hooked on drugs by their pimp, as a way to keep power over her. Keep in mind Germany had legalized prostitution and they make billions off of it, look at how big our country is, thats alot of revenue, besides if you think prostitution is disgusting and perverted, just don't frequent the establishments, plaine and simple, besides making something illegal doesn't take it away anyways.
I don't think that prostitution is disgusting or perverted at all! Do you think that there is no illegal prositution in Germany? Do you think that if we had legal prostitution there would be no pimps or gangsters? You would be wrong. We would have nice, clean, well run, organized and taxpaying legal brothels AND pimps and street whores. Nevada has legal brothels. They require that the men get washed first and wear a condom. Where do you think men who don't want to fiddle with washing and have personal objections against condoms go? The pimps of Las Vegas! If a man wants to pay extra to beat the crap out of a woman, he just pays the pimp more. Drug up the whore and she won't be able to move. They won't get that in a legal brothel. The main difference is that instead of a little time lost by being picked up for solicitation, the street whores will be fighting tax evasion charges.
You are aware that in Germany a woman that turns down working in a brothel can lose her unemployment benefits aren't you?
Then there is the Netherlands. They have had legal prostitution longer than Germany. They recently cleaned up their famous red light district and closed over half the legal whorehouses. Why? Because the authorities found out that some of the legal sex workers weren't exactly willing. They had been kidnapped and sold to legal brothels as sex slaves. The women didn't get the money they earned. The brothels were owned and run by international criminal organizations.
There really isn't much of a moral objection to prostitution. Objecting to considering it a normal occuption might be objectionable, but not the act of prostitution. The logistics are another story. Likely there is a place for legal prostitution it can't hurt. Just recognize that it isn't going to help either.
And that brings me back to the same song I have been singing for what feels like forever now. The Founders intended the Federal government to provide the national defense and promote the general welfare (meaning everybody's welfare and not targeted groups) and respect and protect each citizen's unalienable rights and then l
eave us alone to form whatever sort of society we wished to have. We would be the first nation of people in the entire history of the world who would have freedom free of a monarch, Pope, dictator, or other totalitarian government that assigned the rights and privileges we would be allowed to have. The first people in the world to have the freedom to govern ourselves.
Toward that end, if the people of the state wanted legalized gambling, open saloons, adult bookstores, pornography at 7/11, prostitution, or no speed limits, they had complete freedom to have that. Or they had the right to ban any or all of those things if that is what the people wanted. Within the state, if a community didn't want adult bookstores or brothels or pornography on the magazine stand at 7/11, it could zone such thngs out of that community. Each community could say that bars or adult bookstores could not build near an elementary school or that obscene language could not be broadcast from a rooftop.
In other words, the people could form whatever society was aesthetically or practically pleasing according to their personal values, standards of decency, and shared values. Just because something is legal or illegal somewhere else, does not mean that people in other places are required to ban it or required to accept or condone it in their own community.
Legalizing something most of us identify as 'vices', whether socially acceptable or not, will invariably make some things better. And as Katz so competently stated here, it won't fix everything and is likely to create other problems. Just as legalizing recreational drugs for adults would solve some problems and issues, but would almost certainly force the dealers to turn all their attention to the kids and step up their efforts to addict them.
There is something to say for shared values and if those are strong enough and widespread enough, most of the market for illegal activities will dry up. When the norm is that promiscuity is not socially acceptable and/or when the norm is that each of us should accept personal responsibility for what we choose to do, an issue of whether Congress should force insurance companies to include contraceptives in their coverage would never come up.
