Contra Prostitution.

Lisa Schiffren blasts the "victimless crime" argument.

At a time where the California Supreme Court is on the verge of rewriting marriage laws despite the sovereign people having repeatedly stating its will to the contrary, this last part can't be written off as far-fetched:

A second point against legalizing it, is that it is very hard to maintain society-wide moral opprobrium against anything that the state has legalized — especially when the state benefits from it. If you make prostitution legal, the state gets to tax it — so it has an interest in promulgating it. This is especially problematic in a welfare state. There were some interesting stories out of Germany a year or two ago, noting that, since brothels were legal, young women without skills whose welfare benefits had run out, were being encouraged by their social workers to take jobs as prostitutes. In fact, they were being coerced, with the threat of cutting off any state support. Refusing to be a whore was (is?) being treated no differently than refusing to be a janitor or a maid or any other unsavory but honest labor.

I don't want my government profiting from prostituting women. I do not, for one moment, believe that making it legal will make it cleaner. It will be the same dehumanizing transaction for the women and children who stock the brothels. It will only make it harder to make a convincing moral argument against selling one's body or giving it away too freely.