Emancipation

Dear Friends,

Some of you are familiar with my views on prostitution. I have never viewed it as amoral and believe it should be legal. Many marriages and relationships are prostitution and given an empty respectability for their real or portrayed monogamy. Like Prohibition and the War on Drugs, this situation has simply empowered the worst elements of national and international criminality. Our legal system has only facilitated sex trafficking and "white" slavery by punishing the victims while letting go the customers who in some instances are shamed by having their names published for needing sex. It wasn't until the end of the Clinton Administration that the Justice Department began to look into the enslavement and rape for profit that has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of young people every year. The JD under the Bush Administration admirably began addressing this horror movie reality as a priority.

But the FBI are not the ones who bust whore houses. Local authorities in the vast majority of states follow local laws and end up arresting and imprisoning kidnapped boys, girls and women, treating them as criminals rather than victims. They do not rescue them.

This has been of special concern to me as an American. I love the writing and sentiment of the Declaration of Independence but feel that it was a crock of shit. I would have never signed the Constitution of the United States. We did not even begin to drag toward anything anyone could call freedom and liberty until the most important battle of our Civil War, the fight for the Thirteenth Amendment (beautifully portrayed in the recent film "Lincoln").

Not only in my country but in my hometown and adopted city slavery has been allowed to continue. Locking up and deporting rape victims, many of whom are not welcomed back to their former homes, has done nothing to hurt the business model of the sex slave trade which discards their victims after a few years as their market value (youth and beauty) are quickly consumed. 

Finally, New York state, the immigrant state to this day, is addressing this injustice. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/nyregion/special-courts-for-human-trafficking-and-prostitution-cases-are-planned-in-new-york.html?hp&_r=0

Hopefully this initiative will prove successful and a model for the rest of the country.

I apologize for this piece's lack of humor, which though perfectly valid and often more effective in communicating the essence of an issue, but I wanted you all to be aware of a little noted change in a part of our society that could prove to be a small but very real turning point in this country's unending struggle to manifest its highest ideals.    

Don Arrup

Author of Satire1