Not according to the author of this article:
John Moore: Prostitutions foes are welcome to their moral offence. But hands off of the law, please.
People are squeamish about sex. So it’s understandable they’re going to be squeamish about those who have a lot of it and more so about the fact that some people trade sex for money.
Tuesday’s court ruling that the Criminal Code’s hodge podge of laws surrounding the otherwise legal practice of prostitution are unreasonable has left moralists who think their squeamishness should trump other people’s freedoms sputtering. Not only are they astonished that the law will no longer backstop their efforts to impose a state morality, but they’ve been stunned by the fact that some of the most articulate people in the debate are a bunch of out and proud prostitutes lead by an affable whip-cracking dominatrix known as Madam de Sade.
The article goes on to make the familiar argument that the state should not be imposing the values of “moralists” on everyone else, thereby limiting their freedom. The problem with this argument is that it can also be used against any law that limits freedom – and all laws do that.
Implicit in the article is the presumption that it is wrong to harm other people or to unnecessarily restrict their freedom – precepts which themselves are moral. If the state is not to “legislate morality”, what should it legislate: immorality? If harming another person is an immoral act – and it is – no-one would argue that the state should not legislate against it on the grounds that it is legislating morality. One might argue that the law’s preventing destructive acts such as murder are necessary to prevent social chaos: that is also a moral judgement, though, since it assumes order is better than chaos.
Our laws are based on a Judeo-Christian ethic: to legislate morality in some form or other is inescapable. The question is, is prostitution immoral? Christian teaching says that sex other than between a married man and woman is wrong; selling sexual intimacy is wrong. Prostitution is not a private act of immorality, it is one which requires society’s acquiescence in order to operate: it should be illegal.
Prostitution is soul killing. What he’s said is wrong on so many levels. I’d like to take him on a prayer walk through Ottawa and show him what the end results of his “freedom” are.
Another one of the arguments in favour of prostitution is that it is between consenting adults, and as long as it is done in private the rest of society should not interfere. After, when done in private it affects only the participants.
The big problem with this argument is painfully obvious. It is the same argument that has been used (successfully) to legalize homosexual behavior. What we have now is a litany of very public parades of a celebration of homosexual behavior. It did not stay “private”! And those of us who find it offensive now have no recourse. Now when we voice our objections we are accused of hatred, and our children are taught to consider homosexual behavior as “legitimate”, no matter what the parents say (this now being included in the mandatory curriculum of our public schools).
So how long until our children are taught that prostitution is a “legitimate” line of work on “career day”?
– the State likes to control and legislate on everything else, why should this be different? The state (at least here in Britain) is happy to produce machinery to sexualise young children in schools (as part of “education”) – why not educate them against the evils of sex? Or would that be acting against “freedom” and “liberalism”?