Supreme Court Protects Prostitutes…Next Year

Jonathan McLeod

Jonathan McLeod is a writer living in Ottawa, Ontario. (That means Canada.) He spends too much time following local politics and writing about zoning issues. Follow him on Twitter.

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2 Responses

  1. dragonfrog says:

    I hope to the gods I don’t much believe in that they don’t just use this as the excuse to ban prostitution outright.Report

  2. KatherineMW says:

    I’m really not comfortable with the idea that the Supreme Court may, in effect (even if they claim that’s not what they’re doing) be legalizing prostitution by fiat. It’s a very serious policy issue, and I think the courts have gone beyond their purview in this. They can’t know whether striking down those laws will, in the long run, make conditions better or worse for women who have entered or been coerced into the sex trade, so they don’t have basis to conclude that striking them down will further those women’s constitutional rights.

    From what I’ve read about countries that have legalizing prostitution – in a book about modern-day slavery – in countries like the Netherlands where it’s been done it’s led to increased sex trafficking and sex slavery, because it’s easier to disguise an illegal and coerced brothel as a legit brothel than it is to disguise a brothel as another type of business.Report