Glenn: I support your view that prostitution -- so long as it takes place in private, between consenting adults -- ought be decriminalized. We punish far too many acts as criminal where there is no victim.

More broadly though, I wonder if we need to realign the relationship between criminality and politics.

I was in Iceland not too long ago. I was pulled over for speeding. As the cop pulled out his portable credit card reader to take my on-the-spot payment for my infraction, I was struck by how different the interaction felt than when I've gotten pulled over in the U.S. There was no pretense that I had done anything wrong in any moral sense. It was more like I had chosen to speed and so I was being required (after the fact) to purchase a "license" of sorts for doing so.

In the U.S. it's almost as though we treat all violations of law as if they're malum in se. We certainly treat politicians that way -- especially if the laws are silly and moralistic.

Why is it that the mere conviction for a crime renders one unqualified to serve as a politician? There are millions of people convicted of crimes in the United States every year. Most of them perform jobs skillfully. In a nation where the criminal law has come to occupy an outsized role, isn't time to consider some violations of it as unfortunate but not disqualifying.

"Prostitutes are sexually/physically assaulted in the course of their work on average of once a month."

Prostitution's illegality makes it more likely that prostitutes will get assaulted.

There is nothing inherently dangerous about selling sex. What makes prostitution dangerous is that it is performed in the shadows, because prostitutes fear the law. And when prostitutes are victims of crimes they don't go to the police, again becuase they fear the repercussions.

Thanks for having the courage to say this Glenn.

I look forward to the day where consenting adults can have whatever type of sex they want in their private space. Indeed, for those who are serious about that principle, laws against prostitution begin to look a lot like other anachronistic limits on human sexuality -- anti-sodomy laws, laws against sex toys, etc.

More broadly, it seems time for true liberals to adopt a proudly libertarian stance on social (though not economic) issues. I don't know what others' self-actualization might look like; but I do believe they are the best judges and affectuators of it.

Hey Glenn:

Your post makes me wonder: how do you feel about gun laws? Should we ever punish their possession or just their misuse?

And where do you draw the line between acts and items that are dangerous only if misused and those that are so inherently dangerous that they ought be illegal.

Did you see the monumentally stupid article by USA Today about the same poll entitled "Opposition to Iraq War is Divided After 5 Years":

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-12-warpoll_N.htm?csp=34

Your point about McCain is well taken. The press love for him knows no bounds, but:

It's worth pointing out that McCain is not the only one who gets a free pass on this conflation between Iran and Al Qaeda. One of the m.o.'s of the Bush administration has been to blame all violence there on their bete noir of the moment -- failing to distinguish between the various groups, with divergent interests that contribute to instability there.

For most the war this has meant blaming all violence on "Al Qaeda." This is wrong on a number of counts -- as Sadr and various others groups are often the true cause of the violence. But even when Sunni extremists are the source of violence, the term Al Qaeda is obscures the very real difference between Al Qaeda in Iraq and Al Qaeda. The two are largely unrelated groups. And yet, as some shorthand, politicans and the media have adopted the Bush language and refer to AQ-I as AQ. Even most of the liberal blogosphere does it. The result is to obscure who our real enemy is and to reduce the world to some sort of Mannichean us-versus-them struggle.

The same is true with McCain's conflation of Al Qaeda and Iran. The Bush administration adopted this trope during the period when it was beating the drums for war with Iran most loudly. For so long they had been blaming all the violence on AQ. Now they wanted to point the finger at Iran, so why not suggest a link between the two -- even though one is Sunni and one is Shia and they don't much like each other.

Most of the political class has gone along with this sort of sloppy and manipulative conflation of our "enemies." And the press gives everyone -- not just McCain -- a free pass.