{"id":9991,"date":"2010-09-30T09:27:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T13:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=9991"},"modified":"2010-09-30T09:27:54","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T13:27:54","slug":"should-prostitution-be-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/should-prostitution-be-illegal\/","title":{"rendered":"Should prostitution be illegal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not according to the author of this<\/a> article:<\/p>\n

John Moore: Prostitutions foes are welcome to their moral offence. But hands off of the law, please.<\/p>\n

People are squeamish about sex. So it\u2019s understandable they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u2019s court ruling that the Criminal Code\u2019s hodge podge of laws surrounding the otherwise legal practice of prostitution are unreasonable has left moralists who think their squeamishness should trump other people\u2019s freedoms sputtering. Not only are they astonished that the law will no longer backstop their efforts to impose a state morality, but they\u2019ve 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article goes on to make the familiar argument that the state should not be imposing the values of \u201cmoralists\u201d 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 \u2013 and all laws do that.<\/p>\n

Implicit in the article is the presumption that it is wrong to harm other people or to unnecessarily restrict their freedom \u2013 precepts which themselves are moral. If the state is not to \u201clegislate morality\u201d, what should it legislate: immorality? If harming another person is an immoral act \u2013 and it is \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s understandable they\u2019re going to be squeamish about those … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[265],"tags":[2234],"class_list":["post-9991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prostitution","tag-prostitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}