Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. – Ayn Rand
One of the absurdities which inevitably arise from the concept of a “consensual crime” is that a person can simultaneously be a “criminal” and a “victim” in the eyes of the law, which is rather like someone playing tennis with himself. In the real world this sort of situation would be rightly viewed as impossible, but legislators and prosecutors delight in forcing people to pretend that dry water, cold fire and gaseous solids can exist in reality. The most common example of this nonsense is the insistence that a teenage girl can be tried as an adult (because she is old enough to know better) for “child pornography” because she took pictures of herself, and the law says she is incompetent to consent to such; she is thus simultaneously an evil, perverted “sex offender” and an innocent, helpless child. What makes this even more bizarre is that a 17-year-old girl can legally consent to actual intercourse (and thus risk creating a human life) in most states, yet cannot give her lover a photograph of herself as a keepsake. For the purposes of sex and criminal liability she is an “adult”, but for the purpose of consenting to being photographed she is a “child”. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sick.
But the example I want to discuss today is this one from WRIC television in Richmond, Virginia, which was posted on February 22nd and called to my attention by regular reader Joyce:
A 28-year-old was arraigned by video in Henrico County [Virginia] Tuesday [February 22nd] for 14 charges stemming from the alleged forced prostitution of a young woman. Damien MacIntosh, from Florida, was ordered held without bond by a Henrico judge Tuesday morning. According to police, MacIntosh drove up from Florida and rented two rooms at a Brook Road hotel. He then contacted an 18-year-old girl on a social networking website, making a deal to give her cash for sex. Investigators said he picked her up in Woodbridge, then drove back to the hotel in Henrico. There, police said the two had sex before MacIntosh held a gun to her head and told her “you belong to me now.”
From there, authorities said MacIntosh posted the victim’s picture online and forced her into prostitution. Police do not know how many men the victim was forced to sleep with, but said the money from those transactions went to MacIntosh. In court via video Tuesday, MacIntosh argued with the judge, saying “I don’t know why the police were so upset with me, but they charged me with everything. I just rented a room for someone to sleep there.” The victim, who is also facing a prostitution charge in connection to the sex she had with the suspect, was in the courtroom with her mother. She declined comment.
This version from the Richmond Times-Dispatch of two days later reveals the “gun to the head” as a police exaggeration, names the unknown number of clients as five and adds the interesting detail that Latonya Belle, another woman MacIntosh pimped, is being prosecuted for prostitution despite the fact that she was also apparently under MacIntosh’s domination.
The mind boggles. MacIntosh could not have “forced [the 18-year-old] into prostitution” because she was already a prostitute, and indeed is being prosecuted for arranging the date with MacIntosh in the first place. Now, if the allegations are true (and I’m sure they are) the girl was certainly a victim of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment and possibly rape; all of that is totally straightforward and comprehensible. The contradiction starts when the cops allege that his stealing her money absolves her of blame for being a whore, yet doesn’t absolve the other woman, Latonya Belle (whose money was presumably also stolen). Either prostitution is a crime or it isn’t; you can’t have it both ways. If a thief robs a convenience store and then another thief steals the money from him, is the victimized thief instantly absolved of responsibility for the theft? Of course not, and I daresay if a prosecutor suggested that charges against a thief should be dropped because someone else planned the robbery and stole his loot immediately afterward, he’d probably be fired on the spot.
Clearly, what’s going on here is a conflict of premises. The traditional American police and prosecutorial view of prostitution is that it’s a crime and the prostitute a criminal who is responsible for her own acts. But the new, politically correct view of prostitution is that it’s a form of “slavery” and that all prostitutes are acting under coercion from “pimps” (or, in the case of Swedish Model cultists, the male population in general). Cops and prosecutors are thus under tremendous political pressure to come up with “pimps” or “traffickers” to arrest, and “anti-trafficking” laws like the new one in Georgia make it much easier (not to mention more lucrative) for the state to accuse any male (including her husband) who has anything to do with a prostitute of being a “trafficker” so he can be made the scapegoat for her “offense”. But in the absence of such laws or any visible male target, cops and prosecutors automatically revert to the traditional premise and persecute the woman instead. Thus, in many American jurisdictions whores are now filthy criminal miscreants unless they have male associates, employees or companions of any kind, at which point they morph into pure and innocent victims, their red dresses magically turning white with the wave of a prosecutorial wand.
I think it’s safe to say that MacIntosh was a disgusting criminal who deserves to be locked up, but let’s prosecute him for what he did rather than for some imaginary violation of the sanctity of womanhood. He should be arraigned on exactly the same charges as would be filed against him had his victim been a cook, secretary or cab driver, and people need to wake up to the fact that what really allowed him to keep the girl prisoner for as long as he did was the fact that because of criminalization she was more afraid of the police than she was of him, else she could’ve called 911 as easily as she called her father.
