And Now for a Surprise...

Top of the evening to all.

And it is not just going to be a surprise to you. It is a surprise to me.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) is one of the candidates presently running for President of the United States. Of all of the Democrats out there, she comes across as the most intelligent, the most articulate, and the quickest on her feet. If she ends up as the candidate, the President will have a real fight on his hands.

As the Democrats go more and more off the deep end, she said something that has stuck with me for several weeks now. She believes in the decriminalization of prostitution.

And here is the surprise: I agree with her. (Hang on...let me finish...)

So many of the women involved in prostitution were once little girls. They had toys. They played with their friends. They went to school. Perhaps they planned their weddings in late-night hushed chats. Prostitution is not a lifestyle many of them even considered a possibility, let alone chose.

How does it come to pass? So many of those women who end up in prostitution have at some point been the victim of serious sexual violence. Still others have been trafficked around the world. They are slaves, in the worst possible way. Prostitution is not a choice. It is a life (if you can call it that) that has been thrust on them.

As survivors of sexual violence, as slaves, they are victims. There is no other crime in the world in which we punish the victim. We punish the perpetrators.

This crime should be no different. It should be punished not just for soliciting a prostitute, but also for attempted slavery.

My agreement with Senator Harris ends there. She states further: “(b)ut when you are talking about consenting adults, I think that you know, yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed."

Here is a very thorough study from the University of Chicago: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/695670.

Sorry Senator, you are wrong. People are being harmed. Slaves do not consent. Survivors of violence often lose sight of who they are. And there is no way that being forced to engage in the most intimate of activities with multiple people multiple times in an evening will not cause both physical and psychological harm.

Leave these women alone. However, pimps and johns should absolutely be prosecuted, aggressively and emphatically. Theirs is the crime. Theirs should be the punishment.

Have a good evening everyone.

R/SCG