"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." - First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America (1789)
(note: I am not saying I disagree with a decision to outlaw discrimination, just pointing out the absurdity that the Commerce Clause was 'interpreted' as being the only way to do this [which ultimately resulted in government limiting free speech])
In hand-wavy terms... in this case the commerce clause was used to prevent a farmer from growing wheat on his own land for use in feeding his own livestock. The federal government had established limits on wheat production at the time as part of the "New Deal".
That was not overreach. At the time, laws limited how much wheat a farmer could grow so as to maintain the national price of wheat. (Wheat hasn't been a purely local product in more than a century.) The farmer in the case grew more than his allotment. He sold the allowed amount but then used the excess to feed his own cows, rather than buying it from the market (or taking it out of his original allotment). If allowed, at scale this would render the crop controls meaningless and would have destroyed the price of wheat during a time of war, driving thousands of farmers into destitution and eliminating a potential resource needed for the war effort.
Of course it was overreach and a tortured interpretation of the commerce clause to get there.
The "time of war" argument is completely bogus. The word "war" doesn't appear anywhere in the decision itself nor are its consequences limited to wartime in any way. The law in question was a 1938 law that was trying to increase government management of agriculture economic activity. While progressive are happy to use any crisis that comes along to further this sort of overreach into economic activity, including war, one could equally say that the courts decision was probably at least as influenced by the fact that Roosevelt had appointed 8 of the Justices that heard the case and the court was ideologically aligned with him... since the 1938 law was part of his disastrous economic program (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...), it's little wonder they sided with the government.
Please reread your US history. The law was passed during the Great Recession. The ruling was issued during WWII.
And wheat absolutely was a national, not a local, product in 1930, which made it well within the textual scope of the commerce clause. Whether or not they should have implemented wheat controls is separate from the fact that they had the power to do so.
The whole reason this power was given to Congress was so that no one state could unfairly regulate economic activity in another state. The idea being that it was better to have one set of relatively neutral rules than dozens.
As for your study: the two authors of the study are noted neoconservatives who claim that the economy only recovered when unions lost their power, completely at odds with actual history, in which the height of the American economy coincided with the rise of union power.
> since 1996 federal law has provided broad protections for online publishers of third-party content. Backpage has successfully argued that it can’t be held legally responsible for the criminal conduct of others—no matter how reprehensible.
They're not arguing that they have the right to publish ads for illegal services. They're saying they're not liable for what 3rd parties post on their site.
They're saying they're more like journalists, simply reporting what other people are saying (which happens to be promoting illegal services). While it sounds like they are pro-decriminalizing sex work, no one is arguing that it's legal to advertise criminal behavior (selling drugs, weapons, sex, etc.). They're just telling the courts to go after those advertisers individually rather than Backpage.
Backpage's case would be stronger if they hadn't set themselves up to profit from this type of illegal advert, and if they hadn't hampered law enforcement at every opportunity.
Yeah it's a dubious case IMO. The 1st amendment is incredibly important and even more so in journalism, but this seems like a retroactive last ditch defense.
They clearly wanted to profit off of the sex industry in places where it was still illegal to do so.
There are plenty, but there are also definitely a lot more on the Republican side. A majority of self-identified Democrats favor legalization, while a majority of self-identified Republicans are against: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
> "Pretending it isn't a partisan issue is silly."
The stats to which you refer don't support that dismissal.
In that survey, 50% of Dems supported legalisation/decriminalisation (which you'll notice is not quite a majority, or is a narrow one if you ignore the undecideds) and 34% of Republicans supported it.
So it's a 16 percentage point difference. Yes there's more support among Democrats, but not so much so that you can dismiss it as a partisan issue.
Anecdotally, here in Australia, someone I know very well works in a government policy role administering sex work, and some of the most strident campaigning in favour of re-criminalisation comes from the left. In this state it was a conservative government that legalised it in the early 90s, in the first year they came to power after 10 years of social-democratic government. There's no campaign from the conservative side to re-criminalise it here.
Agreed but it's not that black and white. The overall success of the decriminalization also depends on the culture and education level of the populace and the ability of the govt to enforce the laws. From, what i remember of my talk with ngo friends in india, in a poor developing country like india or bangladesh, legalization of prostitution would actually increase the trafficking.
Similar reason why allowing everyone firearms works in Scandinavian countries but is an issue in the US
which Scandinavian country allows everyone to have firearms? As a swede I thought I would have known about this, yet to the best of my knowledge there are quite strict rules around it, especially when compared to the us, in every Scandinavian country.
Not nearly as liberal as the US though. Afaik you are very much limited where you are allowed to have ammunition loaded into the rifle, concealed carry isn't a thing at all and the police can ban you from owning guns
I wonder, why governments don't make getting sex easier.
Why isn't there any app where you can just pay to have guaranteed safe sex in a government audited establishments without any drama?
Right now, many play a game of courting a potential mate. Sometimes, feelings are hurt due to unpredictable nature of this game. It results in manipulation, lies and faking. It might make people who repeatedly fail to get any sex, a criminal.
When was the last time your date showed up without makeup? This reeks dishonesty, ambush and manipulation.
Efficiency of this market can cure many issues like sexual harassment, end scam market of pickup artist and many other crimes of passion.
Chasing other sex should be outlawed unless they've subscribed to the app and the application for sex goes through the government devised route.
If I've unsubscribed then no one should offer me drinks for the purpose of getting sex. This is good for everyone's sanity.
Why not just have an app and bet sums of money there, then everyone will be motivated to acquire more money instead of playing other games.
Blame is on society for making the act of paying for sex through sweat/blood a stigma.
Without sex we would have gone extinct by now and yet sex is not considered as the primary need of humans.
I know a lot tech workers who were promised sex in return of favours - training, jobs, finanical help using signals and later got sexual harassment charges when they successfully delivered.
Humans are seflish. They want something in return of something.
The most convincing argument against the commodification of sex is, in my opinion, that such intimacy holds a special enough place in human psychology that even an efficient sex market wouldn't make people happy.
I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.
Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.
Yes, it’s also the predominant view of the inexperienced, incels, sex-shaming dogmatics or losers whom don’t want others getting any either. If the “logic” of forbidding prostitution held, consenting adults exchanging money happening to involve a camera wouldn’t be allowed either. Prohibition never works. Ensure the safety of sex workers, not by driving them to require pimps and street-walking as FOSTA does. Most of the world came to this inevitable conclusion and decriminalized it. It’s about damn time magical-thinking snobs don’t get to have a say about how other people live their lives or make a living, because there’s no protecting of human-trafficking victims involved, in-fact, it put them in greater danger and further in the shadows. Government and religion should stay in their lanes. If they want to find human-traffickers, go ahead, without threatening whole industries or people’s livelihoods.
> The most convincing argument against the commodification of sex is, in my opinion, that such intimacy holds a special enough place in human psychology that even an efficient sex market wouldn't make people happy.
If you're not doing this bit in a standup routine, you should be. "It's not cheating honey! It's just the commodification of sex!"
Is prostitution legal? If not, these ads / sites must not be allowed. Hope it does not contradict your point, that these girls should have law and police on their side, they probably have it in AU. Ozzie here too.
Backpage is not about adults who had the free choice to sell sex.
Backpage is about children who were kidnapped, drugged, and sold to be raped being advertised on Backpage. This happened with the knowledge, and support, of Backpage staff, including the owners of the company.
Even if we legalise prostitution between consenting adults who have the freedom to make the choice, we're never ever going to say it's legal to kidnap a child, drug her, and sell her to be raped.
I'm not sure if I agree or not, but I think the argument is this: Legal prostitution would increase the supply enough to make the economics behind illegal trafficking far less lucrative.
I remember being a kid in the 80s and grabbing a free Houston Press [1] whenever I could.
Besides the great Alt-Comics section with Life in Hell and Red Meat, they had a sprawling "personals" section that read like a BDSM and fetish smorgasbord. Nobody seemed to mind that.
The difficulty with this case is that it's very difficult to find a source that genuinely steel-mans backpage.
I noticed one thing, for example, which I will try to describe in a steel-manning way. It appears backpage, at least in part, was working with law enforcement and human trafficking activists. Perhaps not to the extent that those activists would have liked, but I suspect those activists would have preferred them to shut down completely. In assisting authorities/activists, certain keywords were filtered from ads, keywords which might have indicated that someone was under-age. This act of removing those keywords is what now has them in trouble, because the plaintiffs are arguing that backpage is now the "author" of that material rather than just a platform. If this is true, that seems like a dirty trick. The authorities/activists trick you into "helping" in such a way that you actually become a criminal, and then they come after you for it.
It is definitely a dirty trick and doing the typical win-oriented prosecutor thing of spinning every possible reaction as proof of guilt. Crying for your dead wife? Really remorse because you murdered her! Not crying? Remorseless psychopath!
If that standard stands then they are asking for everything to be either user moderated or an absolute cesspool since taking any non-mandatory moderation action would make you responsible for contents. In which case they won't be able to beat up on social media companies for any of their content since they were the ones who tied their hands.
That would make for a hilarious Zuckerberg congress meeting part two. "I would love to help with election meddling but my lawyers can't agree on anything that I could do that wouldn't leave me legally liable for high level felonies."
> It appears backpage, at least in part, was working with law enforcement and human trafficking activists.
But it was not doing this. Backpage was in fact doing things that made it harder for law enforcement to take action.
When people describe Backpage's actions as really fucking evil it's not because no-one is steel-manning backpage. It's because Backpage genuinely was really fucking evil.
When someone posts an ad saying something like "16 year old escort" a non-evil company would have alerted law enforcement. Backpage didn't. Backpage returned an error message saying "Oops! Sorry, the ad poster must be over 18 years of age." (This is the real error message). It would then allow the poster to make an ammendment to the ad and re-submit it. Backpage would not keep this information.
Please read this report, because it clearly details what Backpage did. And don't forget, this document just lists the things that Backpage have said they did.
Even the link you provided suggests Backpage was working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The context that it mentions this suggests that Backpage "may have manipulated" the reports, but doesn't describe exactly what that means. Manipulated could mean something as innocuous as erring on the side of protecting consenting adults, only reporting more obvious cases of exploited children. We don't know though, because in spite of the fact that this negative language "manipulation" was used no details are given. So even in the report written by the people who are trying to put Backpage owners in prison, written in the most negative light possible, I was able to find redeeming information in just a few seconds of skimming.
I heard over a talk radio show recently, that numerous law enforcement officers around the country miss backpage because it was their funnel for stings and arrests and they now don't know where to look for traffickers.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe courts and the congress have a very strange interpretation of this, for example in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
(note: I am not saying I disagree with a decision to outlaw discrimination, just pointing out the absurdity that the Commerce Clause was 'interpreted' as being the only way to do this [which ultimately resulted in government limiting free speech])
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
In hand-wavy terms... in this case the commerce clause was used to prevent a farmer from growing wheat on his own land for use in feeding his own livestock. The federal government had established limits on wheat production at the time as part of the "New Deal".
The "time of war" argument is completely bogus. The word "war" doesn't appear anywhere in the decision itself nor are its consequences limited to wartime in any way. The law in question was a 1938 law that was trying to increase government management of agriculture economic activity. While progressive are happy to use any crisis that comes along to further this sort of overreach into economic activity, including war, one could equally say that the courts decision was probably at least as influenced by the fact that Roosevelt had appointed 8 of the Justices that heard the case and the court was ideologically aligned with him... since the 1938 law was part of his disastrous economic program (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...), it's little wonder they sided with the government.
And wheat absolutely was a national, not a local, product in 1930, which made it well within the textual scope of the commerce clause. Whether or not they should have implemented wheat controls is separate from the fact that they had the power to do so.
The whole reason this power was given to Congress was so that no one state could unfairly regulate economic activity in another state. The idea being that it was better to have one set of relatively neutral rules than dozens.
As for your study: the two authors of the study are noted neoconservatives who claim that the economy only recovered when unions lost their power, completely at odds with actual history, in which the height of the American economy coincided with the rise of union power.
They're not arguing that they have the right to publish ads for illegal services. They're saying they're not liable for what 3rd parties post on their site.
They're saying they're more like journalists, simply reporting what other people are saying (which happens to be promoting illegal services). While it sounds like they are pro-decriminalizing sex work, no one is arguing that it's legal to advertise criminal behavior (selling drugs, weapons, sex, etc.). They're just telling the courts to go after those advertisers individually rather than Backpage.
They clearly wanted to profit off of the sex industry in places where it was still illegal to do so.
Pimps hold far less power when the prostitutes have legal recourse and police on their side.
Decriminalizing prostitution and criminalizing the person doing the "buying" in public is the maximum that is viable without encouraging abuse.
Pretending it isn't a partisan issue is silly.
The stats to which you refer don't support that dismissal.
In that survey, 50% of Dems supported legalisation/decriminalisation (which you'll notice is not quite a majority, or is a narrow one if you ignore the undecideds) and 34% of Republicans supported it.
So it's a 16 percentage point difference. Yes there's more support among Democrats, but not so much so that you can dismiss it as a partisan issue.
Anecdotally, here in Australia, someone I know very well works in a government policy role administering sex work, and some of the most strident campaigning in favour of re-criminalisation comes from the left. In this state it was a conservative government that legalised it in the early 90s, in the first year they came to power after 10 years of social-democratic government. There's no campaign from the conservative side to re-criminalise it here.
Similar reason why allowing everyone firearms works in Scandinavian countries but is an issue in the US
Finland has a very high number of (hunting) weapons. It is significantly harder to get a pistol or a semi-automatic weapon.
Switzerland, I think, allows semi-automatic firearms for almost everybody, and has more liberal gun laws in general.
Why isn't there any app where you can just pay to have guaranteed safe sex in a government audited establishments without any drama?
Right now, many play a game of courting a potential mate. Sometimes, feelings are hurt due to unpredictable nature of this game. It results in manipulation, lies and faking. It might make people who repeatedly fail to get any sex, a criminal.
When was the last time your date showed up without makeup? This reeks dishonesty, ambush and manipulation.
Efficiency of this market can cure many issues like sexual harassment, end scam market of pickup artist and many other crimes of passion.
Chasing other sex should be outlawed unless they've subscribed to the app and the application for sex goes through the government devised route.
If I've unsubscribed then no one should offer me drinks for the purpose of getting sex. This is good for everyone's sanity.
Why not just have an app and bet sums of money there, then everyone will be motivated to acquire more money instead of playing other games.
Blame is on society for making the act of paying for sex through sweat/blood a stigma.
Without sex we would have gone extinct by now and yet sex is not considered as the primary need of humans.
I know a lot tech workers who were promised sex in return of favours - training, jobs, finanical help using signals and later got sexual harassment charges when they successfully delivered.
Humans are seflish. They want something in return of something.
I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.
Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.
that's exactly what religious conservatives of all sorts say when they want to prosecute extramarital sex
Is the even a country with the likes of such a "sex market"? Is it worse or better than others?
If you're not doing this bit in a standup routine, you should be. "It's not cheating honey! It's just the commodification of sex!"
Backpage is about children who were kidnapped, drugged, and sold to be raped being advertised on Backpage. This happened with the knowledge, and support, of Backpage staff, including the owners of the company.
Even if we legalise prostitution between consenting adults who have the freedom to make the choice, we're never ever going to say it's legal to kidnap a child, drug her, and sell her to be raped.
Please read this. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
Besides the great Alt-Comics section with Life in Hell and Red Meat, they had a sprawling "personals" section that read like a BDSM and fetish smorgasbord. Nobody seemed to mind that.
[1]https://www.houstonpress.com/
I noticed one thing, for example, which I will try to describe in a steel-manning way. It appears backpage, at least in part, was working with law enforcement and human trafficking activists. Perhaps not to the extent that those activists would have liked, but I suspect those activists would have preferred them to shut down completely. In assisting authorities/activists, certain keywords were filtered from ads, keywords which might have indicated that someone was under-age. This act of removing those keywords is what now has them in trouble, because the plaintiffs are arguing that backpage is now the "author" of that material rather than just a platform. If this is true, that seems like a dirty trick. The authorities/activists trick you into "helping" in such a way that you actually become a criminal, and then they come after you for it.
If that standard stands then they are asking for everything to be either user moderated or an absolute cesspool since taking any non-mandatory moderation action would make you responsible for contents. In which case they won't be able to beat up on social media companies for any of their content since they were the ones who tied their hands.
That would make for a hilarious Zuckerberg congress meeting part two. "I would love to help with election meddling but my lawyers can't agree on anything that I could do that wouldn't leave me legally liable for high level felonies."
But it was not doing this. Backpage was in fact doing things that made it harder for law enforcement to take action.
When people describe Backpage's actions as really fucking evil it's not because no-one is steel-manning backpage. It's because Backpage genuinely was really fucking evil.
When someone posts an ad saying something like "16 year old escort" a non-evil company would have alerted law enforcement. Backpage didn't. Backpage returned an error message saying "Oops! Sorry, the ad poster must be over 18 years of age." (This is the real error message). It would then allow the poster to make an ammendment to the ad and re-submit it. Backpage would not keep this information.
Please read this report, because it clearly details what Backpage did. And don't forget, this document just lists the things that Backpage have said they did.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...