From public defecation to shoplifting, California’s Democratic establishment has a consistent approach to crime: deal the problem at hand by legalizing the criminal activity. Then the “crime” goes away, presto chango. Lazy governance at its best.
And so it is with San Francisco’s recent problem of rampant street prostitution. Supervisor Hillary Ronen has put forth the idea of creating an open-air red-light district.
Exactly what the City by the Bay needs. But San Francisco, under one-party rule, has quite literally gone to die Scheiße. Residents and visitors now make use of online maps to chart the best walking paths around the aforementioned public defecation.
If the red-light district proposal passes, common sense (a commodity in short supply in California politics) suggests that it will not go well. But what about the larger debate about sex work and free choice?
Just as smoking a joint in the privacy of one’s living room is different from selling heroin to schoolchildren, not all prostitution is the same. To be blunt about it: if a woman can give sex away, then logic holds that she should also be free to sell it.
Behind-closed-doors sex work, involving only consenting adults, is one thing. That is where legalization and/or decriminalization should start. This young lady quit her job as a forensic accountant on Wall Street to become a highly paid “professional girlfriend”. You might approve of that and you might not, but it’s no threat to the public at large, and she certainly knows what she’s doing.
Street-based sex work, on the other hand, is a public nuisance, and (in the United States, at least) is often associated with the drug trade, and everything that the drug trade entails.
No city needs that. But this is only one way in which California’s far-left Democrats are doing their best to run the Golden State into the ground.
