Well, after 7 pages of rhetoric, some of it convincing as hell, some of it totally irrelevant, much of it emotionally charged, and quite a bit of it confusing and misleading, it seems unlikely that anything I say will be even slightly new. But here goes:
(1) I see no relevance at all in whether or not a majority of Americans support or oppose legalized prostitution. This is for several reasons:
-The whole point of having a debate is to attempt to change people’s minds.
-I would bet good money, although I doubt that there’s any evidence to support or oppose this point, that while people like Wring and Kabbes have (whether or not I agree with them) well thought out arguments that are not just about morality, the vast majority of people who would vote against legalization would do so simply for black-and-white moral reasons. So even if Wring is not attempting to legislate morality, I would be that many many people are. Thus, I don’t care about their opinions.
-100 years ago, I’m sure that the vast majority of Americans would have opposed legalization of consenting homosexuality. Which is not to say that consenting homosexuality is analogous to prosititution. I’m simply pointing out that the opinions of the vast majority of Americans can be, and have been, stupid.
(2) The “burden of proof” argument that has come up recently is quite interesting. It seems to go something like this:
A: The government doesn’t have the right to tell people what they can or can not do, unless there’s a really really clear need to do so in that situation
B: Sure, but the government does have the right to regulate commerce. For instance, it’s illegal to sell a kidney or be paid to be a surrogate mother.
I guess my response to that is that sure the government has the right to regulate commerce, and the government has the right to make certain things illegal, but as far as I know there are very very few things which are legal between consenting adults but illegal if money changes hands. Which is not to say that there should never be such things, but the paucity of such examples does tend to point towards a high burden of proof for anyone to hurdle who wants to make such things illegal. Which leads to…
(3) The fact is that prositituion is currently illegal. Some people are using this as an argument to keep it illegal, or as evidene of the will of the people, or as weight in the question of who has the “burden of proof”. I believe that this is also irrelevant, for reasons similar to those in (1) above. The fact that it’s illegal right now is, as far as I know, and I’m happy for someone with a good knowledge of legal history to correct me, more or less a holdover from the puritanical days of yore in which every conceivable “vice” was illegal. Prositituion is illegal now, I would argue, not because someone has done a convincing analysis of the costs and benefits of it being legal vs. illegal, but because it’s always been illegal, people are used to it being illegal, and any move to make it legal would be political suicide, because it’s very hard to argue in favor of legalization without seeming, on the surface, to be pro-prostitution, that is, pro-sex, pro-slavery, pro-abuse, etc. etc. etc. (Note that I am not trying to argue for or against legalization in this paragraph, I am simply arguing that the current status of prostitution (illegal) is not, imho, a substantive or valid argument for keeping it illegal.)
(4) To address Wring directly, as she seems to be the most vocal opponent of legalization: I believe that one could summarize your arguments as follows…
(1) the situation as it is right now sucks, due not so much to the prostitution itself as to the numerous other things which are associated with prostitution, particularing trafficking (few people would argue with this, although there does seem to be some dispute as to exactly how much trafficking there is)
(2) If prostitution were made legal, the imprimateur (sp?) of governmental and societal acceptance would vastly increase the demand for prostitution without significantly altering the supply.
(3) Legal prostitution would be, due to regulation and taxes, significantly more expensive than illegal prostitution.
(4) Therefore, legal prostitution would be unable to meed the demand for prostitution, so the supply of illegal prostitution would remain constant or even increase.
(5) Therefore the bad side effects mentioned in (1) would increase
(6) Therefore things would be worse off than they are now
Is this in fact a more or less accurate summation of your argument?
If so, I’ll try to address some particular issues in your chain of reasoning, but on a broad scale I will say this: if I were in absolute charge of the laws of the US right now, I would, without question, make prostitution legal, and strictly regulate legal prostitution for concerns of health, consensuality, etc. I would, in addition, crack down as hard as possible on illegal prostitution, to the tune of long mandatory jail sentences for johns and pimps. (I’m not sure what I would do about illegal prostitutes). Then, and here’s the important part, 15 years or so later I would evaulate the situation in the country, compare it to what it was before legalization, and decide whether to leave it legal or revoke it.
Now, of course, this is not a particularly practical suggestion, since of course, I am not God. But the way I see it, Wring’s argument may be correct, but only if every single link in a reasonably long chain of logical connections is sound. If one argument is “things are bad, and a implies b implies c implies d implies e implies f implies that they would get even worse if we legalized” and the other one is “things are bad, and there are a number of reasonable sounding reasons to think they might well get better if we legalized”, well, it seems to me that it’s at least worth a shot.
Of course, I’m really only addressing the issue of whether prostitution should be legal in some kind of hypothetical universe (the one where I’m God), not the real current U.S. What I would like to see, and which I don’t think anyone has provided (despite the impressive numbers of links and cites that have been thrown around) is objective studies done on localities in the US pre- and post- legalization of prostitution. Is there a significant trade in trafficked women to those counties in Nevada with legal prostitution? Does the quality of life in those counties generally suffer due to said legalization? etc. Any other statistics (gross numbers of horrible things happening worldwide, what happened in Australia or Holland), even if they were indisputable (which they’re by definition not, since someone disputed them), are less than completely relevant.
I wish I had more time to type in all my thoughts on this topic, but one last thing… I’m sure someone will complain about my “I am God” assumption up above, but honestly, what else can we do? What is the exact question being asked here? It could be one of many things:
-if you were God what would you do? (I gave my answer, other people’s answers likely differ, no harm, no foul) (or rather, if you were God only as far as making laws were concerned…)
-If you were the US president right now, what would you do?
-If the issue came up for a vote in the US right now, how would you vote? (Personally, I would presumably vote pro-legalization on libertarian grounds, but of course it would depend on the exact wording of the bill)
-Is prostitution “good” or “bad” or neither?
-Would legalizing prostitution be a “good idea”?
-Etc.
I chose to answer the first because it’s in some ways the clearest, not necessarily because it’s the most useful or most interesting…