Hard time for flirting

In Farmington, Utah, junior high and high school kids have been using the camera functions on their phones to take nude pictures of themselves that they then show to their friends. This perfect intersection of technology and the teenage sex drive will elicit little more than a sigh of resignation from anybody who remembers their own adolescence -- well, except for Davis County prosecutors, that is. Law enforcement authorities there have arrested the "offending" teens, charged them with misdemeanors and sent them into the juvenile justice system to face "fines, community service or behavior classes." For taking pictures of their own bodies.

Oh yeah -- and prosecutors are congratulating themselves on their leniency.

[Davis County Attorney Troy] Rawlings described the majority of the teens as good kids who do well in school and who aren’t the type to defy the law. Many didn’t realize that what they were doing is illegal, he said.

He explained that while the actions of the teens matched felony charges more closely than misdemeanors, his office wanted to send a message to not be unduly harsh. So they used “a bit of legal fiction” to match the acts to the crime of lewdness rather than the crime of distributing child pornography.

Well, I suppose that a legal minor showing a naked photo of herself to her boyfriend could constitute "distributing child pornography" -- if you're completely insane.

I know that it's entirely too late in the game to hope for anything resembling common sense and restraint to emerge from a prosecutor's office. But here's a small suggestion to those legal eagles standing between us and the villainous hordes who threaten decent society: Maybe flirtatious snapshots really shouldn't be a criminal matter.

Prostitutes are victims -- of the law

The titillating tale of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's downfall has had two beneficial results. One is the end of the self-righteous hypocrite's political career of course. The other is revival of interest in legalizing prostitution. The benefits are clear: stripped of outlaw status, the sex trade could operate in the open, enjoying all of the protections and benefits of a legal enterprise, without the dangerous baggage that attaches to any trade conducted in the shadows.

There's push-back, of course. San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer Caille Millner claims to be "surprised" by the number of people she's encountered who don't think people should face fines and imprisonment if they exchange sex for money. It's hard to know what to say about somebody who is so easily shocked, or who insists that long-established arguments for legalization are "incoherent," except that she seems rather sheltered and just a bit closed to opinions that contradict her own.

Millner dismisses arguments that laws against prostitution are widely ignored, saying, "people also murder other people 'anyway,' and no one's clamoring to legalize that."

But that's the point, isn't it? Murder is held to be immoral and worthy of punishment by virtually everybody, which is why nobody wants it legalized. That's because murder has clear victims and perpetrators. Prostitution, on the other hand, has no victims in and of itself; there are providers and customers, but the participants are willing. Some people are forced into prostitution, but that act of slavery is the evil, and is an artifact of the illegal nature of the business. That most participants are willing is reflected by the fact that prostitutes are punished by law and that sex workers have organized to change the law.

The consensual nature of prostitution undermines Millner's claim that "our legal system isn't written simply for the purpose of expediency, it's also written to underline morality." It's hard to send a message about morality when there's widespread disagreement about whether the criminals or the law enforcers are the good guys. Laws against prostitution, as with other laws against victimless activities, then become nothing more than a temper tantrum by the majority, joined with blunt threats against the dissenting minority.

Millner argues, implausibly, that legalizing prostitution might, somehow, make it more dangerous for participants in the business. Right -- because access to courts, doctors and police is such a harbinger of doom. And finally, she asks: "Is this the kind of 'career route' you would want for your sister or your daughter?"

Not necessarily. But it's not really my place to make business decisions for my relatives. Besides, if my sister or daughter does choose to peddle her favors for money, I think I'd like her to be able to go about her business without fear of being rousted by the cops.

But why would a woman -- or man -- go into the sex trade? For the answer to that question, we turn to somebody who actually knows what she's talking about: anthropologist Patty Kelly, who spent a year studying workers at a legal Mexican brothel.

Here's what I learned: Most of the workers made some rational choice to be there, sometimes after a divorce, a bad breakup or an economic crisis, acute or chronic. Of the 140 women who worked at the Galactic Zone, as the brothel was called, only five had a pimp (and in each of those cases, they insisted the man was their boyfriend).

The women made their own hours, set their own rates and decided for themselves what sex acts they would perform. Some were happy with the job. (As Gabriela once told me: "You should have seen me before I started working here. I was so depressed.") Others would've preferred to be doing other work, though the employment available to these women in Mexico (servants, factory workers) pays far less for longer hours.

Hmmm ... no slaves here in a brothel operating in the open. And since the prostitutes Ms. Kelly studied worked in a legal business, the police were their allies, not their enemies.

Kelly doesn't pretend that the women she studies led idyllic lives -- the trade might be legal, but it's still stigmatized and has its own risks. But, as she adds:

[C]riminalization is worse. Sweden's 1998 criminalization of commercial sex -- a measure titled "The Protection of Women" -- appears not to protect them at all. A 2004 report by the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the police found that after it went into effect, prostitution, of course, continued. Meanwhile, prices for sexual services dropped, clients were fewer but more often violent, more wanted to pay for sex and not use a condom -- and sex workers had less time to assess the mental state of their clients because of the fear of getting caught.

That makes sense. The idea that you protect people by threatening them with legal consequences and denying them the resources available to legal workers is ludicrous. Any trade conducted in the shadows will have more risks than one conducted in the open.

Don't expect real-life experience to sway the Caille Millners of the world. They've concluded that trading sex for money is stained with immorality and that the law, no matter how counterproductive or ineffective, must send a message. Considering the people fined, jailed and victimized in the absence of legal recourse, that's an expensive telegram.

Perv police entrap suspects

Courtesy of Declan McCullagh at CNet's News.com:

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

You mean the feds can do that? They can crash through people's doors because they clicked on links that looked like they led to illegal material, but didn't?

Apparently so. CNet reviewed the law and found that courts have approved the technique. The feds can sit back, record the IP addresses of anybody who taps their mouse at the wrong moment, and then charge in with guns drawn.

McCullagh points out just where this sort of fishing expedition can lead (as if it hasn't led too far already):

The implications of the FBI's hyperlink-enticement technique are sweeping. Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography--and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages. The bureau could register the "unlawfulimages.com" domain name and prosecute intentional visitors. And so on.

The judge presiding in one defendant's case even ruled that the possibility that one of his neighbors clicked on the link while connected to the Internet through his WiFi network "would not have negated a substantial basis for concluding that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of child pornography would be found on the premises to be searched."

That means that one surfer using a shared IP address over a network can bring down a world of trouble on anybody else using the same connection. That would seem to be a very common scenario, since many Internet providers use dynamic IP addresses (any of you techies tell me if I'm misinterpreting this scenario).

This is a bit reminiscent of last year's revelation that New York City police were planting purses in public view and arresting anybody who picked one up without immediately heading for the nearest cop -- with potential penalties of up to four years in prison.

It's obvious that we've reached a situation in which law-enforcement agencies feel perfectly justified in setting moral booby traps for the public at large -- and then raining damnation down on anybody who can be interpreted (even mistakenly) as making the wrong choice.

That's right -- life as a series of hidden tests, with prison time and humiliation the payoff for hesitation or a twitchy mouse finger.

Happy surfing. And be careful of what you pick up in public.

Eliot Spitzer sullies prostitutes with his presence

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy bigger prick.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer who, among his many crusades against mere mortals, enthusiastically prosecuted those engaged in the victimless crime of providing sex for money, has been named as a client of Emperors Club VIP, a high-price prostitution ring.

I personally have nothing against prostitution. As a consensual activity among adults, it's nobody's business but that of providers and clients. If Spitzer were a live-and-let live kind of guy, his patronage of prostitutes wouldn't matter worth a damn.

Alan Dershowitz tried to make that point on MSNBC a few minutes ago -- that this is a made-in-America scandal that wouldn't make the newspapers in Europe. He'd be right if Spitzer weren't such a sanctimonious creep who has made a career of taking the moral high ground in public while doing whatever he damned well pleases behind the scenes.

As governor of New York, Spitzer was caught using the state police to spy on state senate majority leader Joseph Bruno, a political enemy of the ambitious Spitzer. Clearly, he considers himself above the rules that apply to the rest of us. So it comes as no surprise that he's capable of prosecuting some sex providers while paying cash for services rendered to their competitors.

Hmmm. That raises a possibility ... Was Spitzer doing favors for his favorite pimps and madams by engaging in a little selective prosecution?

Oh, what a wonderful scandal.

Strong minority opposes Arizona marriage amendment

I'm not surprised that more Arizonans support a proposed state constitutional amendment "that would define marriage as between one man and one woman" than don't. I am pleasantly surprised, however, that social conservatives enjoy a rather small advantage on the issue. According to the latest Cronkite-Eight poll, "[f]orty-nine percent favored the amendment, 40 percent opposed it and 11 percent said they were unsure how they felt." It's a bit trendy now to fret over the supposed gay threat to the oh-so-sacred rite of marriage, so it's nice to see that the Goldwateresque Arizona live-and-let live impulse still has a bit of life in it.

Actually, it's 40-percenters on the issue who are the traditionalists. As Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, wrote for the New York Times back in November 2007:

Why do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

So ... What's all this nonsense about asking the county for a license to get hitched? How did that get started?

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

By the 1920s, 38 states prohibited whites from marrying blacks, "mulattos," Japanese, Chinese, Indians, "Mongolians," "Malays" or Filipinos. Twelve states would not issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a "mental defect." Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after divorce.

Ah! So, you mean there's an unsavory origin to the government's intervention in what was previously a purely private matter? I never would have guessed.

Oddly, this means that the growing ranks of Americans living "in sin" (married couples now constitute a minority of households) are the ones harking back to the traditional concept of marriage by rejecting this newfangled idea about seeking state permission to lay their toothbrushes side-by-side.

Unfortunately, marriage has been turned into an administrative sub-unit of the state. Cohabiting couples may be perfectly happy with their arrangements, but they'll likely run into trouble when it comes to inheritance, making medical decisions for ill partners and collecting Social Security. That -- along with the fundamental respect to be found in being treated equally -- is why gay and lesbian couples have been so eager to gain the same access to marriage licenses as straight couples.

But easing paperwork for government officials seems like a poor reason for allowing the state to further expand its reach into our private lives. Surely, if neighbors, priests and judges found it possible for a thousand years to recognize privately constituted marriages as legitimate, Social Security administrators can eventually find their way to the same accomplishment.

Returning to privately arranged marriages could have the added benefit of allowing couples (or hell, any number of partners) to define the terms of their arrangements to their liking. Under state-defined marriage, government retains the power to redefine marriage in ways that may not please everybody concerned. As the Cato Institute's David Boaz wrote for Slate:

In the 20th century, however, government has intruded upon the marriage contract, among many others. Each state has tended to promulgate a standard, one-size-fits-all formula. Then, in the past generation, legislatures and courts have started unilaterally changing the terms of the marriage contract. Between 1969 and 1985 all the states provided for no-fault divorce. The new arrangements applied not just to couples embarking on matrimony but also to couples who had married under an earlier set of rules. Many people felt a sense of liberation; the changes allowed them to get out of unpleasant marriages without the often contrived allegations of fault previously required for divorce. But some people were hurt by the new rules, especially women who had understood marriage as a partnership in which one partner would earn money and the other would forsake a career in order to specialize in homemaking.

Returning to private rites, but with the very modern option of individually defining the terms of the marriage contract, would allow the conservative-minded to make arrangements under the authority of their religious institutions that please them, the experimental to customize something to their taste and would force nobody to believe that they were giving their imprimatur to relationships that offend their sensibilities.

Defining marriage "as between one man and one woman"? Well, that just wouldn't be an issue for political debate.

And wouldn't it be nice if matters of love and relationships weren't the subject of political debate?

Forty percent of Arizonans oppose an amendment defining the meaning of marriage? Let's move toward a solution that allows everybody to define their own marriage.

Texas gets freaky

Says the Associated Press:

A federal appeals court has overturned a statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas, one of the last states — all in the South — to retain such a ban.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

The state Attorney General's office has, apparently, not yet decided whether to appeal.

What?

How is that even a debate at the AG's office? Why would state officials even contemplate spending time and money in an attempt to combat the dread scourge of dildos?

Oh, I know. It's because there's still a political constituency out there that thinks sex is bad, and joyless, anorgasmic bluenoses are prone to march to the polls and demand the death penalty for anybody sporting a certain "morning after" glow.

Ah, the wonders of democracy.

Technology and the abortion debate

Abortion isn't about to go away as a contentious issue any time soon, but the the controversial procedure is losing much of its vulnerability to public protests and political intervention because of long-anticipated changes in technology. Says the Washington Post:

The French abortion pill RU-486, on the market since 2000, has become an increasingly common alternative, making abortion less clinical and more private. At a time when the overall number of abortions has been steadily declining, RU-486-induced abortions have been rising by 22 percent a year and now account for 14 percent of the total -- and more than one in five early abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.

Where once abortion meant identifiable providers and centralized clinics that could be targeted for protests and public shaming -- or more-violent reactions -- now the procedure increasingly involves discreetly obtaining a drug from a wider pool of physicians who don't need to acquire the specialized training and equipment required for performing a surgical procedure. As one patient quoted in the article reveals:

"It was something I could do at home and be with my husband," Gilbert said of taking the pill. "It was a decision we made together alone, and we were able to take care of it this way alone. It was just a much more private affair."

She added: "I wouldn't say it was easy -- it's never easy to terminate a pregnancy. But in the grand scheme of things, it was much more pleasant than a surgical procedure."

The shift in the way abortions are performed may just be starting, since, in some European countries, "more than 60 percent of abortions are performed with the drug."

None of this is likely to change the moral and political debate over abortion, of course, but it is an illustration of how advances in technology can help to make even the most controversial practices more accessible and less susceptible to public scorn and political shifts. Indeed, the easier abortions are to obtain without walking a gauntlet of protesters or traveling far distances, the more widespread they're likely to become.

Whatever your opinion on abortion itself, there's a lesson here on how to entrench any controversial practice or product by improving the ease with which it can be obtained and by dispersing the practice or product to a multitude of relatively unidentifiable sources.

Imagine, for example, what reducing the production of firearms to an easy and practically automated home workshop activity can/will do to the debate over gun control. To a certain extent, that has already happened, but advancing technology promises to put production in the hands of even the least skilled tinkerers.

Technology can't settle debates over right and wrong, but it can make those debates somewhat pointless.

Fighting rape with porn

Over at Reason magazine, columnist Steve Chapman points to Clemson University Economics Professor Todd D. Kendall's much-discussed paper (PDF) concluding that the increased availability of pornography in the United States in recent years has helped to reduce the rate of sexual violence. As Chapman points out:

Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent.

How can that be? Isn't pornography supposed to awaken the beastly libido in poorly restrained men? Alternately, isn't rape a crime of violence, rather than sex -- and therefore one that should be disconnected from sexually explicit material?

Well, Kendall can't be absolutely certain, but he does have an interesting theory as to why the rate of sexual violence has plummeted even as the most explicit material has become easily available on millions of Websites.

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

Kendall's paper isn't a substitute for a commitment to free speech as a matter of right, regardless of possible abuses of that right. But Kendall's findings do supply valuable ammunition for people looking for a pragmatic argument in favor of allowing adults to produce and exchange sexually explicit material -- because permitting such exercises of free speech can have socially beneficial effects.

A little love for Larry Craig

OK, so I had a little fun a couple of weeks ago with Larry Craig's uncomfortable situation. Now he's found new allies in the ranks of the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the sting that busted him for allegedly cruising for "dates" in an airport men's room is likely unconstitutional. Pundits have found a little irony in the notably anti-gay senator's representation by the ACLU in a gay sex scandal.

But, having already joined in the pile-on, let me back off a bit to give Sen. Craig his due. It was just a couple of years ago that he reportedly drew the wrath of President Bush for questioning the wisdom of the Patriot Act. In fact, according to Doug Thompson, of Capitol Hill Blue, "Bush referred to Craig as 'a goddamned traitor' and told the National Republican Senatorial Committee to start recruiting someone to run against the Idaho Senator in 2008."

Sen. Craig didn't outright try to kill the odious Patriot Act, but he did break with the White House and his own party's leadership to demand major revisions. That's an atypically courageous gesture--and the right move--for a sitting politician.

Larry Craig is no across-the-board civil libertarian--few members of Congress are--but he's one of the few Republicans in Congress who ever, however inconsistently, expressed concern about the rights of the individual.

Before we celebrate his downfall, let's just see who's likely to replace him.

When government officials get down and dirty

Radley Balko has fascinating news about the ongoing persecution of bar owner David Ruttenberg in Manassas Park, Virginia. The story fulfills pretty much every paranoid nightmare about just how low government officials can go when they're out to screw private citizens.

Iowa?

This interesting turn of events from today's news:

A county judge struck down Iowa's decade-old gay marriage ban as unconstitutional Thursday and ordered local officials to process marriage licenses for six gay couples.

It's good news but ... Iowa? Really?

The pleasure is all mine

I write this as I lounge on my sofa, sipping a glass of bourbon. There's a cool summer breeze wafting in through the window, and I just concluded an enjoyable evening with my wife (and child, at the beginning) of pasta, conversation and a little TV (a retrospective on the first five years of Saturday Night Live--the only years that matter). The important thread running through all of this, one too often given short shrift, is pleasure. The things I did tonight, at least in the way I did them, from creating a fancier supper than necessary to pouring myself an evening drink, have given me pleasure.

Pleasure is an oft-derided value in American life. I'm reminded of that fact as I peruse the latest hysterical headlines about Americans getting fatter and Sen. Larry Craig cruising for "dates" in men's rooms. Sen. Craig has speckled his career with a series of anti-gay votes while, apparently, personally nurturing a taste for beefcake. Americans as a whole are being driven into a panicked lather about expanding waistlines--an expansion fueled by their own relatively new-found (in historical terms) access to plentiful supplies of cheap and flavorful foods. In both cases, a failure to recognize pleasure as a value in and of itself is in play.

Assuming the charges against Sen. Craig are true--and let's not forget his guilty plea--he's on record supporting a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage even as he engages in an almost two-dimensional stereotype of anonymous gay sex. But I think I'm on solid ground saying that the public fascination with Craig's case has little to do with his rank hypocrisy and everything to do with his pleasure-seeking behavior. As sexualized as our culture is, sex is still laden with all sorts of cultural baggage that renders it, in the eyes of the many, as something a bit shameful. We have trouble imagining public figures stripping down and slipping between the sheets--let alone getting freaky in public places. Trouble imagining it? Hell, we think it's a bit icky--better that they say their prayers and utter "good night" with a chaste peck on the cheek.

And what about obesity, that very visible demonstration that food is now plentiful and affordable? Of course eating is enjoyable; besides earth-shattering sex, is there anything more pleasurable than a plate of Pad Thai washed down with a cold beer? Well, a pulled-pork sandwich might do the job too. Why shouldn't people indulge in the gustatory delights denied to hundreds of generations of their ancestors through droughts, plagues of locusts and general crop failures? And if a Buddha belly isn't the healthiest shape for the human body, well then, neither is the skeletal definition of a bout of starvation--and starvation isn't half as much fun as pigging out at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

That's right, pleasure involves trade-offs--but so do all values and preferences. It's up to each of us to decide what's important to us--what will gain us the most enjoyment from life. For some, it's sexual abstinence and a diet of greens and tap water; for others, it's a turn greased up in the sling followed by a smorgasbord. One path may lead to a longer life, but the other may mean a more fulfilling one--depending on your tastes. Most of us, of course, fall somewhere in between.

But pleasure is very definitely an important value, and one which we're all entitled to give the weight we, individually, believe it deserves. And if that means that our neighbors make choices that we wouldn't emulate ... Well, hell, let's just hope that they're having a good time.

Heh heh

Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie takes Sen. Larry Craig to the woodshed--not for his fumbling men's-room come-ons, but for his hypocrisy on the issue.