Finally, someone's caught up to my original post. Let's take a look at the Constitution: Article 1, Sec. 10 says that states can't:

1. make treaties with foreign governments,

2. grant letters of marque

3. coin money

4. pass bills of atainder or ex post facto laws

5. pass laws impairing the obligations of contracts.

6. law taxes on imports and exports

7. engage in war with Congress's consent.

8. etc.

Damn, where is that part about states not being able to ban prostitution? It's not here. I guess we'll have to look elsewhere.

How about Article IV. Nope, here's it's all about full faith and credit, privileges and immunities, extradition, admitting new states, and guaranteeing republican forms of government. Nothing about banning prostitution. Damn, damn.

Where should we look, where should we look. Nothing in the Bill of Rights applies.

I know, I know! The 14th Amendment:

"No state shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

If we are going to find a state law unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, we have to first ask if there is any fundamental right at issue. Fundamental rights are things like voting, starting and raising a family, and the rights provided by the Bill of Rights to the extent they have been incorporated against the states. Guess what? Prostitution ain't a fundamental right.

If a law does not affect a fundamental right, it will be upheld unless it is not rationally designed to further a legitimate governmental interest. Prohibitions of prostitution are rationally designed to further a legitimate governmental interest, Aych, and you won't find a court in this country that will disagree with that.

So, the constitution doesn't outlaw prostitution bans.

It doesn't really matter though, since you have decided to follow your own strawman. Did you think that invoking the constitution would somehow defeat my argument about democratically enacted laws? Hell, you might as well have argued that I was wrong about 50%+1 because everything in New York legislature has to be enacted by a 3/5 supermajority. I'm almost certain that isn't true, but even if it were, there would still be properly enacted laws that will apply to people who disagree with them.

Welcome to the show.

"I am really astonished -- though I know I shouldn't be -- by how much people enjoy expressing moral outrage over the sexual lives of other people."

I hear you. One very unsurprising underlying pathology among large segments of faux Puritan America is its fascination with sex--sex, being a biologic imperative regardless of orientation, this should be no more surprising to people than becoming thirsty and needing water. But the prurient or salacious quality of the interest and the moral outrage that seems to follow I attribute to misogynistic religious doctrine, male sexual inadequacy or dysfunction, and a misscaled moral barometer that ranks sex as more problematic than the wholesale killing of human beings and the destruction of our biologic lifesblood--the planet. This is learned not innate.

I came to the immutable conclusion a long time ago that 40% (and that may underestimate the actual number) of the American population is not only factually misinformed, they are afflicted by mental illness of one variety or another and have a limited capacity for empathy that stops at the family/tribal level due to acculturation via American mythologies like "bootstrapping/equal opportunity/equality/theocracy of prosperity". People are taught to cognitively disconnect from reality at a young age. These same people rarely become high functioning critical thinking adults but rather remain trapped in a moral and functional state of adolescence.

We've also become a physically and mentally ill society because of the way many are forced to live their lives has them all out of whack. From the way we produce and consume food, to the poisonous materials in the homes we live, to the "medicines" we take, to how our economcy must necessarily structure our work lives and tasks. We've entered a period of neo-feudalism but instead of agrarian based it is technology based.

We are at root elegant biomechanical electrochemical machines illsuited by process of evolution for this particular lifestyle and it's making us sick in myriad ways. Hypersexualiztion is symptomatic of a fundamental imbalance. We don't eat, sleep, exercise, socialize, engage in sexual relationships, or work in ways consistent with biologic imperitives. Just my .02 pop psychology pseudoscience analysis which when combined with $1.73 might buy somone a bus ticket.

resignation announcements from our professional client philanders across the aisle?

Or, should Spitzer have simply asked Jesus to forgive him to keep his job?

The Governer of NY is hardly the only hypocrite.

with your comparisons and your insights, but little do you and the other heretics know that your continued wrongness is the face of Tina’s axiomatic rightness merely labels you as a patron and therefore oppressor of coerced prostitutes and a denier of what your own heart knows to be true. Cease your futile resistance! Tina is privilege to the truth, all who oppose her are wrong and are merely trying to cloak they’re dark, prostitute using, shame.

For example, should crackheads be allowed to be prostitutes to pay for their drugs?

Umm.. If crack were legal, it would be inexpensive enough that users wouldn't need to go into illegal businesses to afford it.

Prohibition *always* drives up the price of the item prohibited.

For instance, cannabis is basically a weed which grows almost anywhere it is not actively eradicated.

And yet cannabis is the #1 cash crop in the US of A..

Cause...Effect..

It's really quite simple.

Hey Glenn.

I dunno if you read all these comments, but consider this:

human nature seldom, if ever, has anything to do with "rational discourse."

Human nature, when you get right down to it, can be summed up by the phrase "what's in it for me?"

Using that criterion, instead of the criterion of "rational discourse" all the gabble about Spitzer can be clarified quickly and easily. Just consider the source, what the source is saying, and, thus, what's in it for them. Period.

I will concede that humans can act in an altruistic, even selfless way, but it's almost always a form of reciprocal altruism, that is, even in an altruistic act, there's something in it for me. Something valuable enough that I engage in the altruism in the first place.

Far more often, though, humans are simply striving to dominate...whether it's a set of cubicles in an office, a few city blocks in south Los Angeles, or entire countries.

Humans want to dominate. That's what we do. We want control, and the benefits that come with control. That is the essence of politics. So, everyone writing and speaking all this gabble about Spitzer has an ax to grind. Everyone. And, thus, while I'm all in favor of rational discourse--I really am--I cannot see where such discourse gets people what they think they want, whatever it may be. Deceit and irrationality are far more potent tools for a human to use to get what they want, and your column here proves it pretty handily, in the sense that everything you cite displays almost nothing BUT irrationality and deceit.

For what it's worth.