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

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (848)	3/14/2008 3:41:17 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 6846

Freedom has limits, Tim. The result isn't, and even shouldn't, always be the one that offers the greatest degree of individual freedom. But offering more individual freedom is always a plus. If other factors are greater than that plus, maybe you don't go in that direction, but you still count that plus in your calculations. 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. You can't shoot someone in the head either, at least not if you don't have a good case like self defense. Freedom doesn't mean the right to attack or defraud others. "FIRE" in a crowded theater where there is no fire is a dangerous type of fraud. Riots (as opposed to mere demonstrations or protests) involved attack other people. etc. Prostitution is covered by state laws. Interstate solicitation of it is covered by federal. This may be where Spitzer stubs his toe. While I think it should be legal, its not a big issue for me, just one of a general concern for liberty, and for better practical results (but probably not incredibly better results, if I thought that than it would be a bigger issue for me, but I think only expecting marginally better results would be realistic, because with any regulation at all, some illegal trade will continue). OTOH creeping federalism of law enforcement is a concern for me. As for constitutional issues, well the feds have an out for things like the Mann act in that interstate solicitation of prostitution is interstate commerce. But the federal charges involving when and how much money you withdraw from your accounts are unreasonable. My opinion is similar to Megan McArdle's here, see janegalt.net ) 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. Who said anything about guaranteeing anything? I certainly didn't. Prostitution happens anyway? Murders happen anyway. Legalize them. This is a non-argument. Murder is a violation of someone's rights. Prostitution assuming no one is forced in to it, is not. (And again when someone is forced in to it the violation is effectively slavery not prostitution). So there is no issue of protecting someone's rights in outlawing prostitution. The issue is the hope to stop things that are seen as a bad thing. But you don't stop prostitution, and probably don't even greatly reduce it by making it illegal. (If one small to moderate sized jurisdiction makes it legal, than it probably will have a large increase, but that's mostly a transfer from other places, not an overall increase). So the prostitution continues, and the bad things about it are magnified. If your real concern is directly with prostitution, and NOT with all the secondary effects such as STDs, abused prostitutes etc. Well then having it be illegal probably does cause a moderate reduction in prostitution, and I guess you get what you want. But if your concern is violence, abuse, STDs, etc, than making it illegal makes things worse. When you practice prostitution without testing in between every trick you do the same. When a prostitute turns a trick she's putting one person at risk of eventual death. A drunk driver puts many more people at risk of immediate death. When prostitution is illegal you increase the chance that the prostitute is putting someone at risk of death. Also when a promiscuous non prostitute has sex without testing and waiting for the results between each new partner, he or she is putting someone at risk. But you aren't seeking to make that illegal. Again - Would you outlaw contract killing but not murder? The existence of the prostitutes attracts a supply that gets satisfied. You mean a demand that gets satisfied? Well that demand already exists, and it isn't made any larger by the fact that some people charge for the supply. The problem with sexually transmitted diseases is more one of promiscuity than prostitution. You're argument amounts to, since we can't stop murders. let's legalize it. Prostitution doesn't violate people's rights murder does. If you legalize murder, you get a larger increase in murders than the increase in prostitution you get from legalizing prostitution. You also get vigilante justice, and perhaps a break down in society. You don't get more liberty you get less. You don't get less violence you get more. If you legalize prostitution you get less danger and less violence. (And you also get less spread of disease)

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (848)	3/14/2008 5:11:48 PM
From: Jeff Hayden	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6846

"I fail to see how any person with a conscience can support this (prostitution)." There you go with that righteousness again. From: religioustolerance.org Divorce and remarriage U.S. divorce rates for various faith groups, age groups, & geographic areas "Stuff... Barna report: Variation in divorce rates among Christian faith groups: Denomination (in order of decreasing divorce rate) % who have been divorced Non-denominational 34% Baptists 29% Mainline Protestants 25% Mormons 24% Catholics 21% Lutherans 21% Barna uses the term "non-denominational" to refer to Evangelical Christian congregations that are not affiliated with a specific denomination. The vast majority are fundamentalist in their theological beliefs. More info. Barna's results verified findings of earlier polls: that conservative Protestant Christians, on average, have the highest divorce rate, while mainline Christians have a much lower rate. They found some new information as well: that atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate of all. George Barna commented that the results raise "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families." The data challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage." Donald Hughes, author of The Divorce Reality, said: "In the churches, people have a superstitious view that Christianity will keep them from divorce, but they are subject to the same problems as everyone else, and they include a lack of relationship skills. ...Just being born again is not a rabbit's foot." Hughes claim that 90% of divorces among born-again couples occur after they have been "saved. ... Variation in divorce rates by religion: Religion % have been divorced Jews 30% Born-again Christians 27% Other Christians 24% Atheists, Agnostics 21% Ron Barrier, Spokespersonn for American Atheists remarked on these findings with some rather caustic comments against organized religion. He said: "These findings confirm what I have been saying these last five years. Since Atheist ethics are of a higher caliber than religious morals, it stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage. There is no room in Atheist ethics for the type of 'submissive' nonsense preached by Baptists and other Christian and/or Jewish groups. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage." 2 StopTheReligiousRight.org had some scathing comments as well: "We hear an awful lot from conservatives in the Bible Belt and on the TV about how we all should be living. Certainly a culture that teaches the conservative religious values of the Christian right must have clean living written all over it. And lots of ripe fruit from their morally superior lives abounding." "It doesn't. Far from it. People that talk the loudest may be the ones walking the slowest. Joining its history of Biblically correct bigotry and discrimination, it is an area with the highest divorce, murder, STD/HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, single parent homes, infant mortality, and obesity rates in the nation. As a region, the Bible Belt has the poorest health care systems and the lowest rates of high school graduation." Now you may ask why I brought this all up? Well you were noting that prostitution is legal in NV (but not in LV or Reno). And then you seem to imply that it leads to moral decrepitude and divorce. It seems prostitution is also legal in Rhode Island as noted in an earlier board note that links to: en.wikipedia.org So, I sez to me, "Jeff, what is the divorce rate for Rhode Island?" That turns out to be about 3.0/1000 to 3.2/1000 which placed Rhode Island from 4th to 10th least number of divorces among the states. Of course you then jump on Nevada as the "den of iniquity" and there are many divorces there. The highest divorce rate is in Nevada, but did you also consider that people tend to get drunk and married the same night in Nevada? I'm not at all convinced that prostitution leads to higher divorce rates - in fact I don't even think there's a connection. However, there is a high probability that many drunken marriages do ultimately lead to divorce.