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Pastimes : Off Topic - Anything Goes -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (842)	3/14/2008 2:46:59 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6846

Reasons to make something legal or illegal. 1 - Democracy, what do the people want. - Well on the whole they want prostitution illegal. So score one point for making it illegal. 2 - Freedom - This point goes in the other category. Freedom has limits, Tim. This is something libertarians never want to admit. Freedom of speech is pretty broad in this country, but you can't legally yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, incite to riot, threaten someone with death or grave bodily harm, threaten the President, talk about bombs or hijackings while boarding a plane, etc. Your freedom of speech is NOT absolute, not here and not in any society. Libertarians are NOT the only inhabitants of this world, much as they wish to pretend otherwise. Their solutions are not always the best. 3 - Constitutional issues - Not really involved here in terms of any state prosecution of Spitzer or the prostitute (except maybe a 4th amendment issue over how they found out about it). Prostitution is covered by state laws. Interstate solicitation of it is covered by federal. This may be where Spitzer stubs his toe. 4 - Public Health - Score this one in the column for legalization. Prostitution happens anyway, and when its illegal your more likely to have prostitutes with STDs and not using condoms. NUTS! I already showed the impracticality of sufficient testing to guarantee customer safety. You CANNOT guarantee their safety without testing and waiting for results after every trick. Anything else is a crapshoot. Prostitution happens anyway? Murders happen anyway. Legalize them. This is a non-argument. And I would compare legalization to legalizing drunk driving. I think that's a pretty bogus. When you drive drunk (at least sufficiently drunk) your immediately, and fairly directly putting the lives of many people at risk. When you practice prostitution without testing in between every trick you do the same. You have absolutely no way of knowing the trick just before didn't transmit some deadly disease. With prostitution, its not the payment that creates a risk of disease, its the sex. But you aren't pushing for sex to be outlawed (or sex between unmarried people, or adultery, or promiscuity, or unprotected sex). The existence of the prostitutes attracts a supply that gets satisfied. The prostitute gets many partners and great opportunity to transmit disease. The large amounts of money attract exploiters (pimps and enslavers) of the women. I fail to see how any person with a conscience can support this. ASIDE: Do you oppose public health quarantines of people with communicable disease too? Your argument is like saying because murder results in dead people, we should outlaw contract killing, but leave murder legal. HUH???? You're argument amounts to, since we can't stop murders. let's legalize it. Even NV limits legalization. Prostitution is NOT legal in Clark or Washoe Counties where LV and Reno - in other words, the state's population - are. Which means that LV and Reno have illegal prostitution problems that are similar to the problems cities in other states have.