They don't care about exploitation and abuse of women.

nice. add in the thing about islamofacism and I'm starting to think you're not for real

making prostitution a punishable offense makes it harder for a woman to remove herself from it. do you really think making it a crime is the better practice?

Because it's using and exploiting women and treating them as sex objects.

Wrong. Sex workers who get paid $1000 an hour are not being exploited; many of these women are putting themselves through grad school doing that job, their clientele is vetted, and there is no bullying "pimp" controlling them.

I was a friend of a now-deceased, gay owner of a male "escort service" in NYC, and some of his young men were NYU students who helped me move when I arrived to work in that city. Those young men were not exploited, and neither are these high-end female sex workers. Who are you to deny both the women and the male sex workers moral agency, and infantlize them by substituting your own ideas as to what they should for their own?

They believe all the "Pretty Woman" and "Lady Marmalade" myths about prostitution, because they think that anyone who has principles is just an inhibited fool or a Republican; it's all about sexual licence for them. They discovered it in the sixties and they can't let go of it.

Xrandadu Hutman just posted a list of horrors. That's sex slavery.

Prostitution happens in a variety of ways at all levels of society. Go to any yellow pages and tell me how many ads there are for escorts in your city. Some of those agencies are classier than others. This prostitution ring involved women whose day jobs in high fashion modeling made them more than enough money to survive. So why did they do it? Some types of prostitution are terrible. We've all seen street walkers. I don't recall any of the women working for Heidi Fleiss complain, until they lost their jobs. A few of the women I went to college with paid for their education by some less than traditional methods. None of them had pimps or walked the streets but a few did work in fancy strip clubs in the city. I'd like to tell you what some of them are doing today but you wouldn't believe me.

...what possible business is it of anyone's, let alone the state's, what he or anyone else does in their private lives with other consenting adults?

L’État c’est nous

It ain't some entity acting according to its own whims. Yet.

So let me get back to you point by point:

Junior Senator: so you opposed Kerry (junior senator) and currently oppose Clinton (junior senator).

Big states: you think because Clinton won New York and California that this proves that Obama would lose those states to an entirely different candidate -- a right-winger?

If the Democratic primary was "winner take all" like the GOP's: yes, Clinton would be in the lead. Go ahead, join the GOP if you prefer that system.

Henry Kissinger will tell you all about power as the ultimate aphrodisiac if you ask him.

;-)

I can't imagine an amount of power that would be sufficient to transform ol' Hank into something other than a repulsive murderous toad.

Does that make me unique? ;->

"Smoked pot once" is different from "smoked pot THIS WEEK."

If it's within the Statute of Limitations, it's every bit as much of a crime as if it happened five seconds ago.

But fine - if someone came out today and said: "Hey, I was at a private party this weekend with Eliot Spitzer and saw him take a drag of marijuana," would you be here saying: "This is a terrible betrayal of the public trust! It's illegal. He must resign!!!"

"Gambled in a poker game" is MUCH more innocuous than hiring prostitutes!

They're both illegal. You can't have it both ways. Either something is illegal and that's it -- end of story. Or you make assessments about how seriousness the lawbreaking is. Which is it? And if you're making seriousness assessments, what factors are you using?

"Committed adultery" is "just as illegal" as prostitution? Are you serious? How many people are put in prison or fined for adultery versus prostitution?

The answer is the same for adultery and hiring a prostitute -- very, very, very few people are ever prosecuted for either crime. But they are both crimes. On what conceivable basis do you claim that adultery is more "innocuous" than hiring a prostitute?

At least with adultery, there is inherently a victim -- the spouse who is cheated on. With prostitution, there is not always a victim -- if a single person hires one, etc.

You just keep spitting out these totally subjective, baseless judgments -- X is more serious than Y! -- and think that you've made some persuasive point. You haven't. It's not even rational. You're entitled to those judgments, but they're totally subjective and you don't articulate any rationale for them.

GG:

-- people who hire prostitutes are almost never prosecuted.

I've seen this claim a couple of times now, and I don't understand it, because I know they're prosecuted in Los Angeles-- both the johns and the prostitutes are prosecuted, and there are LAPD task forces related to catching both:

http://lapdblog.typepad.com/lapd_blog/2007/08/valley-task-for.html

This isn't new. Years and years ago (like *30*), I know they were doing the same thing, because I used to write bench warrants at the County Court here, and I wrote hundreds (over a several-year period) for men arrested trying to solicit prostitutes. Of course, there were a lot more issued for the prostitutes themselves, and for them it was about a 3-to-1 female-to-male ratio. I noticed that 100% of the johns were male-- just the sort of power/gender imbalance that always sets off alarms for me. Why might this be? Why don't women hire prostitutes? There are plenty of male ones for them to hire.

This was many years ago.

I wouldn't suggest it today but when you are young and foolish...

The point is, people will do it for money and others will pay money to get it. Do we really need to create another class of criminals? I'd rather regulate it and spend that money on health care. The real danger of unregualted prostitution is communicable disease.