I make my case for legalizing prostitution over at the
Jolt message board.
There's one moralistic woman on there called "Sheilanagig" who decries the way the women are treated, she has this incoherent train of thought:
Prostitution is a sordid world, no matter what anyone says or tries to do about it. There is so much abuse and exploitation, not to mention degradation, happening to these women. Legalizing it is not the answer. Then we could just add one more exploiter to the list, because it could be legislated and taxed.
The thought of people like this come down to "ooh they are so unfortunate, but lets do nothing about it". What an unhelpful thought on the subject.
Prostitution isn't going to go away, it's been with us forever. So there's basically 3 ways to handle it:
- Leave things as they are having it remain illegal and lightly enforced being controlled by the underworld of drugs, gangs and other thugs.
- Divert even more police and investigators to really cracking down on it hard putting people in prison for a long time and with severe retribution. This however costs a lot and would take away from other criminal investigation and enforcement.
- Legalize it, restrict it to certain zoned locations, slap regulations on it requiring medical testing for STDs and tax it.
There's really no other options available and since 1 above isn't working, 2 above isn't really feasible if you want to continue keeping other crime in check then 3 is the only real option if you want to both remove it as a criminal issue and at the same time reduce the majority of the quips most people have about it.
I understand peoples moral opposition to it, but it ain't going anywhere, so why not reduce as many things that offend people about it as we can?
