Craigslist Gives Into Government Religious Crusade Against Prostitution

[Dan And Jennifer]

It's a sad day folks, seems Craigslist has been pressured into signing a deal with Attorneys General for 40 states to help them waste government money entrapping consenting adults who make a personal decision to trade sex for money.

Looking at that photo op with the Craigslist CEO and one of the Attorney General just has such an ominous mob feel to it. It's so obvious they were bullied into doing this.

I say "government religious crusade" because that's precisely what this is. Making prostitution illegal has zero value to protecting people, and nobody has shown any useful arguments for it, probably because it's only a pseudo moralistic preference. It only sounds good at face value if you don't stop and think about it.

Most problems cited as caused by prostitution (human trafficking, violence, unsafe sex, STDs, etc.) are actually caused by the very laws that drive this industry underground.

If the DOJ wanted to crack down on human trafficking and child trafficking they'd open that industry up completely by making prostitution legal (as it should be) and going after the obviously bad stuff. What was that again? Ah yes, human trafficking. Read: "not" prostitution, i.e. exchange of money and sex between consenting adults. But that type of reasoning gets lost in the news bites and photo ops.

As with many such bills, this one was passed until false publicized pretenses. Per CrunchGear:

The official justification for all of this is to help eliminate human trafficking, especially that which targets children. That’s impossible to argue against, yes, but think of the non-trafficked individuals that now have to jump through even more hoops to do business.

Which to me begs the obvious question...

Here’s a novel idea: how about JUST “cracking down on human trafficking and child trafficking”? I think everyone can agree on that, and you don’t suddenly oppress millions of consenting adults with a bogus bill like this.
This is like the “pork” they hide in congressional bills, only worse because it blatantly oppresses millions of consenting adults.
Seriously, this isn’t the middle ages, the church shouldn’t be dictating our laws anymore.

Just to recap: Craigslist has an "erotic services" section, they obviously have no issue with sex workers.

Here's the article via CrunchGear.

You'll note my eloquent comments there. For example...

Oh good, just in time! We all definitely needed even more religion based law, oh, ahem, I mean law enforcement resources to prevent sex for cash between consenting adults.
Next up: they’ll be deciding if the man paying for a very expensive dinner on a date that ends in sex qualifies as “prostitution” although no cash is involved. Hmmm… a moral quandary indeed.

Be sure to check out the prostitution discussion and prostitution poll of over 4000 people here on AskDanAndJennifer.com. Take the poll and let us know here what you think!

Your thoughts? Comments?

[Exavion]

"Selling is legal, fucking is legal, why isn't selling fucking legal?" - George Carlin.

/thread

The government is a fucking religious corrupt, leeching pig.

[Happy Endings]

Prostitution is legal in Rhode Island, how will they go after people advertising for a legal activity?

What is interesting is the RI Attorney general signed the agrement and prostitution is legal in RI, and other states where prostitution is illegal didn't sign the agreement.

[Ed Christ Pro Erotic]

...but they never talk about how sex for the powerful is plentiful. CNBC presented an hour long special talking about how high class call girls are finding a boom on Wall Street--despite the downturn in the economy--because the men who are their clientele needing a "boost" in their ego to make them feel better. If you didn't know already, Wall Street oozes with machismo regarding the financial business it does on a daily basis. But it kills me how the government who sees a Craig's List or other type of venues offering consensual exchange of sexual services/enjoyment seems to find a heavy hand by government officials. Sadly this same heavy hand is not placed on the folks high in power who are involved in hotel rooms, bathroom stalls, and other discreet places.

Last night I was watching the IFC channel watching one of my favorite talks on sexual issues--Indie Sex: Censorship, Taboo, Extremes, and Teens--and afterwords the movie about the life of Larry Flynn (not the Woody Harleson one) came on. One of the clips they showed was a young Charles Keating (THAT Keating of the infamous Keating 5) talking about the wrongs of pornography in our society. How I would love to be an angel in the corner seeing the various "sins" he's committed out of the site of the PR machine.

Sex should be for all levels of society--the poor, rich and middle class- basically because it is both a human need and a need to feel human. For Craig's List to succumb to the pressures of the FBI is but another intrusion of business and a way to tell business like Craig's List that they can't do the job of weeding pedophiles from their midst. If pedophiles are such a huge problem why don't they focus their thoughts on dealing with the person than trying to clamp down on internet freedoms.