You don’t know this world. You’re making judgments [based] on what you see on television. – Suzy Favor Hamilton
Sometimes my highly-organized format makes it difficult to write about breaking news stories; if the story is too involved for a short item in “That Was the Week That Was”, but the schedule is too tight to bump anything for a full-fledged column, I either have to postpone my coverage (possibly past the limit of freshness) or just ignore it. This was the case with the outing of Suzy Hamilton; appearing as it did on Yule Eve, there was simply no way to work it in before King Day and what I wanted to say wouldn’t fit into a TW3 blurb. This turned out to be a good thing, however; my thoughts about Hamilton, her choices and the judgmentalism and evil-mindedness of the public reaction would barely fill a paragraph, but my opinions of the yellow press coverage are a different matter. And because I’m going to say these things without raising my voice, perhaps they’ll get more attention now that the media noise has died down.
Regular readers of this blog understand that there is nothing “shocking”, weird or even terribly unusual about an educated, accomplished woman doing sex work; the extremely high income and self-esteem boost alone (Hamilton is known to have a history of depression) are more than enough reason, no matter what filthy-minded reporters and pundits have claimed. Furthermore, how she conducts her private life is no more anyone else’s business than how gay celebrities conduct theirs, and if anyone disagrees I suggest he insert his opinions (and the computer on which he types them) into the least comfortable orifice available. While I might question Hamilton’s wisdom in outing herself to some clients, and her morality in continuing to escort (supposedly) against the wishes of her husband, I do that as her sister harlot who knows what our world is actually like, and not as some holier-than-thou, hypocritical ignoramus who has appointed herself moral arbiter over another’s life. Had she asked me for advice I would have told her exactly what I just wrote, but out of concern for the damage her poor choices might inflict upon her, not for some imagined injury to “society” or “decency”.
Have you actually read any of the rubbish these pompous busybodies wrote about a woman who never did them any harm? The pearl-clutching in the original Smoking Gun article is practically audible; it reads like something written by a 70-year-old spinster Victorian schoolmarm rather than by an early-21st century journalist who evidently considers herself urbane:
…she inexplicably shared her true identity with several male clients, believing that her secret was somehow safe with strangers who paid for her company by leaving envelopes stuffed with cash…Hamilton expressed concern that her story would be “sensationalized” by a reporter. It is hard, though, to imagine how that could occur. The actual events of the ex-Olympian’s past year already seem like the fever dreams of a Lifetime producer who decided to adapt Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour for basic cable…it was…a credulous notion that client and escort were morally bound by some implicit pledge of omerta. Why would her secret be safe with guys about whom she knew nothing (except that many were paying for sex while their spouse was back home)? These johns slept with an attractive former Olympian, an All-American girl with a Wikipedia page and a Nike commercial on YouTube. How could they not boast about their costly Las Vegas escapades?…
The author also brandishes the word “illegal” as though it actually carried moral weight, which I submit makes her far more naïve than Hamilton could ever be. The Daily Beast was even more astonishingly ignorant, attempting to harass Las Vegas escort services by phone for information on competitor Haley Heston (the agency Hamilton worked for) and publishing Melissa Farley’s paranoid drivel as though it constituted something other than the diseased masturbatory fantasies of a dried-up, deeply frustrated misandrist:
Melissa Farley…says that…whoever is behind Haley Heston is most likely a pimp or group of pimps. “They are receiving money from prostitution and they have a great deal of control – both physical and mental – over the women that are in their employ”…
Obviously, Hamilton must have been suffering from “false consciousness” when she said, “I take full responsibility for my mistakes. I’m not the victim and I’m not going that route.”
The only exception to this parade of condemnation came from, interestingly enough, Fox News. Though their consultant, Dr. Keith Ablow, felt it necessary to include truly moronic statements such as “[prostitution] is extremely dangerous psychologically and medically,” to make some highly questionable associations and to add two rather creepy caveats to his conclusion, these do not ring true with the rest of his article and I suspect they were either demanded by editors or voluntarily inserted by Ablow to soften the blow of an article in which he subtly denies three prohibitionist myths and calls for legalization:
…there are likely women whose interest in being hired for sex is so strong that, for all intents and purposes, it is their “sexual orientation”…these women are not different…from other women (and men) who want to be hurt during sex…A woman wanting to sell herself because she thinks it is exciting is not much more dramatic than a man who wants to dress as a ballerina in order to feel excited…there are [also]…women (and men) in the business of prostitution for whom it carries no stigma and is lucrative. If we assume that Ms. Hamilton had ten clients a week…then she could have been making $300,000 a year in cash…If she had 20 clients a week (and some of the prostitutes I have treated as a psychiatrist have had 20 clients a week), then she would have made $600,000 a year — in cash…high-priced prostitution is…available in every city. Millions of American men with families and professions are customers. And not every prostitute is devastated psychologically by the experience. As one lawyer and prostitute put it to me…“I suppose that…[it’s] more complicated to have a boyfriend…but I don’t know if it’s more complicated than getting back home from working as a police officer or pediatric neurosurgeon or gynecologist. Lots of professions are incredibly complicated, emotionally”…I take no moral position on the matter…it is time to legalize prostitution, put in place safeguards to help protect those who participate in it, and, of course, tax it.
In case you’re counting, he denies the myths that sex work is inherently devastating, that hookers see dozens of clients per day and that only a small fraction of the male population are clients. And though he does seem to buy into the “damaged goods” myth and clearly has a skewed perception of the fraction of whores motivated by psychological drives rather than pragmatic concerns, it’s heartening that he nonetheless sees criminalization as an unproductive evil; furthermore, it’s very telling that a so-called “conservative” news source is actually promoting a more enlightened view of the subject than two other sources which do not share that political bent.
I think we’re seeing a shift (in the US) in terms of the ideological underpinnings behind prohibition, or at least which ideological group puts more effort into maintaining prohibition. Time was, conservatives were the biggest proponents on the grounds of religious piety. Now it seems to be shifting towards progressives who object to sex work on the grounds of harm or “degradation” of women.
In politics, excuses are pure hogwash; I only care about politicians’ actions. Tyranny executed in the name of “helping” or “protecting” me is still tyranny, and opposition to tyranny motivated by parsimony or by spite against the tyrants is still opposition to tyranny, and I’ll get into the bed of the one who advances the course of liberty no matter what stupid excuse he uses.
Definitely agree with all that. I think the difference will be in how the tyrannical impulse presents itself (e.g., shifting from general criminalization to the Swedish Model).
Politician’s motivations (as distinct from their excuses) matter.
If they’re motivated by something other than tyranny/liberty, then arguing freedom doesn’t work – and many of them aren’t tyrants from the desire to give orders, but from the desire to do good. Convincing them that they do more good by leaving well alone is possible; convincing them that their underlying motivation is wrong is pointless.
We’re starting to see “libertarian” become an acceptable label in the US, to the point where several “conservative” commentators (most recently Glenn Beck) have made the switch. I think this is mostly a good thing, despite the fact that many of those people are not “pure” libertarians. Let’s show them sympathy as they work through letting go of their remaining prohibitionist beliefs.
Ablow has written a fairly good article but he has a quote in there which only reinforces my disdain for “psychology” as it’s practiced today …
Everything comes back to “upbringing” in psychology, which is hogwash. I have two grown kids and they’re great taxpayers now. I don’t think it was due to my “fatherhood” skills that they grew up okay. I have two brothers who have kids and all their kids are great too – and I know one of my brothers isn’t the best parent in the world. The other brother has a wife who’s a “holy roller” and those kids suffer a pretty limiting childhood – yet one is out the door on his own now and doing awesomely. More and more I think the kind of person one becomes has more to do with genetics and wiring – things that you inherit just by being born.
It really outrages me that some of Hamilton’s clients “outed” her. Escorts will tell a client their real name but it’s usually only to a client she trusts – someone she knows. I’ve had two tell me their real names – the first did so because she wanted me to SAY her real name to police if they stopped me on the way to her incall – she did not want me to repeat her artist name (which is all over ECCIE) to the police because that would immediately make a connection between her artist name and real name (artist name derived from me – and real name derived from address I’m heading to for the incall). By reciting her real name to cops – I’m just a “visitor” who’s a “friend”.
The clients who outed her need to be OUTED themselves. They violated a very sacred trust. Yeah, obviously she trusted in the wrong people … but it was they who violated the trust.
By the way – as far as the claim that getting calls from strangers reinforces the idea in a woman that she’s attractive and special … well, I have found most of these women ARE very special. In fact, I wish all women were like them – not because of their attitudes about sex – but their attitudes about life. They are probably the most enlightened women on the planet. They understand men completely (and most “straight” women don’t).
According to Satoshi Kanazawa, that’s exactly what the evidence shows.
Didn’t this just make sense though all along? I mean, humans are a species within the animal kingdom, right? A big part of animal husbandry is selecting pairs of animals to mate in order to reproduce offspring that have certain physical traits and temperament.
English Bulldogs look nasty but they don’t have an ounce of meaness in them toward humans. They are all highly dependent on humans, seek the company of humans – and don’t do well at all when they don’t get emotional attention from humans. Those traits were bread into them.
An analysis of dissociative states among both prostitutes and non-prostitutes does demonstrate a “pattern” where children by the age of 7 when confronted with a trauma that genuinely threatens their mortality have higher incidence of dissociative states, multiple personalities “as it were”. And no, I’m not intimating that child-rearing proximate to Krulak represents a genuine threat to mortality. Then again, genes, indeed, create wiring and wiring, myelination, continues long after birth. So, it may be better to say genes, beans, wiring, environment, and the human company you keep as a young child matter, a lot. Don’t be mad.
Well I agree with most of that. I’m not discounting upbringing completely – only saying that it’s not the pivotal element.
Nature vs. nurture is a false dichotomy, and the last time I took a course on animal behavior (pushing a decade now), it was pretty well taught that way. Evolutionary psychology is the future of psychology, IMO, but I suspect there’s a turf war brewing between biologists and psychologists. Regardless of any pissing contests, they’re sure to provide some interesting information about the life, the universe, and everything.
42
But I think 42 was just a first approximation, right?
😉
We’ll never know. You see, there was this new bypass and…
😉
What made it interesting was the question, which turned out to be, What do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?
That was considered and rejected millions of years ago, man. Get with the times.
I’m curious about your statement on escorts understanding men better than average women.
I suspect that aroused males fall into a few different buckets of behavior. But un-aroused males are more variable.
So maybe escorts fully understand aroused males but can still struggle with understanding men in their personal lives.
But this is speculation. Maybe Maggie or another woman with experience has insight here.
I’m not sure there’s any such critter as an “un-aroused” male. I’m not familiar with that animal! 😀
I was laying sick in my bed once and I told my wife … “Jump under the covers here with me baaaaby!” She shot back … “Jesus! You have pneumonia – how can you even THINK of sex?” Well, I talked her into it and, for about 15 minutes there I forgot I had pneumonia!!
Not all interaction between an escort and a client is in an “aroused” state. In a two-hour session (based on my experience) … there’s probably … “max” … 45 minutes or so of “aroused”. The rest is talking, drinking wine, showering and dressing. Every escort has “regulars” … people who see her repeatedly (that’s why I don’t agree with Ablow when he says escorts get off on getting called and paid by “strangers”. The escorts I know are “suspicious” of strangers and seriously, if you see one for the first time and have a good time – you will have a ten times better experience the second time you see her because you are no longer a “stranger”. That is, unless you “effed-up” something on the first meeting with her.
I don’t know – maybe it’s just me – but I can tell ANYTHING to an escort because I know she knows how men think. I don’t have to hide my real thinking in order to protect her from being “contaminated” with the sex-obsessed male mind – she knows it already and she’s comfortable with it. They normally give really good advice too if you’re discussing a relationship problem you’re having and they can teach YOU a lot about women.
They don’t usually “judge” a book by it’s cover. I was talking to one girl the other day and basically crying to her about how most women avert their eyes when they see me on the street. I’m not Brad Pitt but I’m not ugly or gross. She pointed out that … “you look like a bad ass because of your build, some women aren’t attracted to big guys like you and some are scared of them, and at the very least they feel you might act upon an urge if they give you a signal that you might interpret as interest.” I don’t know … maybe I use escorts as “psychologists” or something. I know I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and my mind is clearer after each session – and that’s not just from the sex because I have had sex with lots of “straight” girls and only felt that way with ONE (in my entire life).
I have to agree with krulac on “outing” people. Saying “I never promised not to tell anyone” — you simply don’t reveal private areas of someone else’s life against his/her will, period. That choice is his/hers to make, and it’s not your place to infringe on another person’s sovereignty. (Of course if he/she is committing harmful fraud and revealing it may protect potential victims or help past ones, then it’s fair game.)
Maggie, you always find the best pictures to go with your posts. That pearl-clutching old lady is just PERFECT!
Thank you! I’ve used her before, but just had to use her again. I try not to overuse good pictures, but sometimes the best one really is one y’all have seen before!
Well said krulac.
I am looking for some good articles to confront alarmists condemnation in Ireland!
The old story of “poor women” forced into prostitution, when in fact its men who are exploited!
Men are no more “exploited” by prostitution than women are; anyone who thinks differently is a closet Marxist. A fair business transaction between two people isn’t “exploitation” of either one; it’s simply a normal economic transaction, such as happens literally tens of billions of times every single day.
Some of those are exploitive as business is all about gaining the upper hand by selling your goods for a price in exces of their value or why else woul the price of LASIK remain so high. And yes, I do intend by comments to be critical of ophthalmologists, pejoratively
Life is about “exploitation”. The gas station I stopped at on the way to work today is exploiting my insatiable need for fossil fuels to run my vehicles.
But then again – I don’t think it’s so much “exploitation” as it is “people taking advantage of their advantages” – which shouldn’t be a crime unless there is something sinister going on.
Put it this way … I LOST $400 once in a casino in … Perth (I think – maybe Sydney) and I have paid $700 for 2 hours of an escort’s time (on multiple occasions) and …
After I left the Casino – I wished I had not gone in there and blown my cash – I wanted it back – I “missed” my money! With an escort – as soon as I lay that envelope on the table – I never think about that cash again. It’s like “cash? What cash? Did I pay for that? hmmmmmmm.”
No, no, the gas tank was being exploited by gas pump so thoroughly that you must pay for the privilege! 😉
Yes, because the salient feature in this issue is who was penetrated by whom. Since the pump is doing the penetrating, it is obvious that the tank is the exploited one!
@Maggie: ” . . . furthermore, it’s very telling that a so-called ‘conservative’ news source is actually promoting a more enlightened view of the subject than two other sources which do not share that political bent.”
While I think Dr. Ablow speaks his own mind, it is unfortunate that contemporary conservatism has lost its way by becoming mired in a bunch of moralistic social judgments and issues. “True” conservatism — what would be closer to modern libertarianism, and even the early Tea Party movement — would urge government to stay out of people’s personal lives and of course would move to decriminalize or legalize prostitution (not necessarily better than decriminalization), and lots of other things that weigh heavily on our society.
You are never going to see “a more enlightened view” on this subject from those on the left, while there is some chance of it coming from more conservative/libertarian sources. Like with Prohibition, it is the do-gooders and moralists and politically correct liberals and neo-feminists who wish to impose their holier-than-thou views and belief systems on the rest of us, and they see government as their best vehicle for doing so. A pox on all their houses!
Traditionally, getting government out of the morality business has been a part of liberalism. You can still see this today in gay rights and the fact that liberals not actually holding office cheer the relaxing of marijuana laws. Unfortunately, many liberals decided that they had to show that they could be as “moral” as conservatives, and so play along or hold back on a lot of these issues, lest they be accused of being immoral lefties who want all of our children to be drug-addled gay whoremongers… or something like that.
Liberals in general and the Democratic Party in particular could pick up a lot of supporters if they’d reclaim some of the personal liberty stuff that both big American parties have forsaken. But neither being right or wrong about an issue matters a lot when one hasn’t the balls to claim it and champion said issue openly. But if the Dems are ever going to grow those nads, it hasn’t happened yet. Then again, the Rs don’t seem to be in any danger of growing said organs either, so yeah. Oh well.
Sailors Barsoom, I think we can agree that any true return to support of personal liberty is unlikely to derive from either of the two major parties in this country. If it is going to arise from anywhere, it will be from what can be termed (in generic terms) libertarianism. Unfortunately, I don’t see any chance of an effective third-party movement gaining significant ground in the foreseeable future, and that is very discouraging.
I differ from you in thinking either that the Democratic Party has no nads — it has plenty, perhaps too many, leading to arrogance — or that it will support personal liberties, particularly in the realm of sexual liberty. There has been plenty of movement in the parties over the past half-century, and what we see is a Democratic Party that today is all about creating a culture of dependency, a permanent underclass, and imposing its supposedly “liberal” values (most rabidly in the neo-fascism of what passes for Political Correctness) by government fiat. Just as Republicans have abandoned true conservatism, Democrats have abandoned true liberalism.
Taking the one issue of gay rights and gay marriage, while undoubtedly many have adopted support of gay marriage as a personal belief, on a macro scale I see this more as a power grab and a means to build the base of the Democratic Party (there are plenty of gay Republicans, too) than any true embrace of personal liberty. As a libertarian, I approach this issue from a completely different perspective. Rather than asking why gays and lesbians should not be allowed to legally marry, I ask why the state should be involved in marriage at all, and see marriage as a completely personal issue between the parties. Perhaps the state might set up a basic framework within which individuals make their own marital agreements, and it is not up to the state to determine who can or cannot enter into a marital agreement or of what those agreements consist. And marital agreements should be enforceable, which they decidedly frequently are not today due to overarching meddling of the judiciary.
We talk a lot about liberty in this country, but when it comes to what we can do with our own bodies we are one of the most repressed and unfree of countries, and that to me is, at essence, un-American.
With clenched teeth this only “but when it comes to what we can do with our own bodies we are one of the most repressed and unfree of countries” if you mean Europe, and there our concept of “free speech” falls short; UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, whichever, no match. As well some other parts of the Bill of Rights.
As for what we can do with our own bodies (that encompasses so much including mouth), the ME, Asia, SA, even Europe, where’s the libertarian paradise? I will agree we are becoming by every month a more repressive society, that our claims of liberty versus others is becoming a chimera and for some has been such too long, but to give that attribute of liberty to other countries which have so less an Enlightenment tradition is a too far a stretch. They are freer in the lurch than in the law. We approach them while they approach us. Europe is a vacillation.
My default position is that “it” probably isn’t any worse here than elsewhere, or worse today than in years past.
That’s my default. I can be talked out of it easy enough. 😉
@Ariel: “As for what we can do with our own bodies (that encompasses so much including mouth), the ME, Asia, SA, even Europe, where’s the libertarian paradise?”
@Sailor Barsroom: “That’s my default. I can be talked out of it easy enough.”
Having lived and worked in seven countries on four continents and Oceania outside the U.S. and traveled in 70-some countries and territories on every continent except Antarctica, I can say with some confidence and authority that we are one of the most sexually repressed societies on the planet. It is not always the legal regime that determines that, but even in that area we are among the most repressive. And yes, becoming more so in several respects.
I am not referring to freedom of speech — that is a separate issue and not within the purview of what I was referring to. We do have some of the best protections for free speech, but we don’t have a corner on the market, and there is enough going on in the sexual area that there is a chilling effect even there.
Aside from that, whether you look at things like criminalization of prostitution, age of consent, statutes prohibiting certain sex acts or representations of them, same-sex marriage or civil union, legal public nudity, and just general attitudes, the U.S. is pretty far back in the pack. Not the back of the pack. I’m not saying that, but by no means at the front. And that includes societies, such as in Latin America or Eastern Europe, for instance, that we tend to think of as so repressed and backward in this area, that literally put us to shame.
Hotlix,
With this I have no argument: “I can say with some confidence and authority that we are one of the most sexually repressed societies on the planet. It is not always the legal regime that determines that, but even in that area we are among the most repressive. And yes, becoming more so in several respects.”
We are at the least the most sexually repressed of the Western World (which includes Japan and South Korea, though the repression there may have different expression). If it weren’t for the ME and some Pacific nations…
“And that includes societies, such as in Latin America or Eastern Europe, for instance, that we tend to think of as so repressed and backward in this area, that literally put us to shame.” Yeah, we are insular, but we do it for the children.
As for freedom of speech, I’ll disagree that we don’t have a corner on the market, even the Netherlands is falling on the issue, and the UK left years ago. Ours has become so absolute compared to others that I can’t agree that the sexual repression has a chilling effect on that area (I will now watch Cable or Netflix, the latter for up close female masturbation or just to hear my wife say “damn, he’s big”, though the films are European).
Different perspective I guess on that. Rashomon.
Elsewhere, we are working to the conclusion of a Republic but without going Empire. Just more repressive, more laws no moral person could understand or even know they violated until the handcuffs.
By that you mean just different?
I love Cleland’s “Fanny Hill: the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” as well Henry Miller (excluding The Rosy Crucifixion), but they weren’t protected by free speech until well into the 20th Century. So it got better.
The Police are less acutely abusive but more chronically abusive. Europeans comment on how abusive our police are versus their own. What’s really sad is so do SAs and expatriate Americans living in Mexico and below. Our police today are taught that if they aren’t in absolute control their lives are in danger, and they respond accordingly by escalating violence rather than defusing violence.
As an aside, and a pet peeve of mine, I was in the USCG and there is no profession in the US more dangerous, more injurious, and more deadly than that of American fishermen. NONE. They die at 10 times the rate of police, and suffer injury at roughly that same rate. I spent a year in Alaskan waters in the 70s and saw fisherman go out in ships half the size of my WHEC Cutter (the finest Cutter the USCG has had; the Legend Class is an ugly sister but it does have a Phalanx Gatling and I was an FT so wow, can I pull the trigger, can I, please) in seas that made sleeping, eating, and working on my Cutter a hazardous chore. There is absolutely no comparison, and I wish we would give those brave souls their due (they can’t skate 30 and get a pension like military or police) rather than the obsequious fawning for a profession 10 times safer. Editorial ended.
Well, it’s true that not everything has gone in the wrong direction. But some things are, and other things are not getting any better. Part of the problem is you never know when some jurisdiction is going to go ape shit over something and bring the boom down over something that until then has gone on unmolested.
Your story about the dangers and hardships of commercial fishing is interesting, but I don’t follow where it fits into this discussion. Garbage collectors have a dangerous occupation, too, but if either gets caught with their pants down and paying for it in most American cities they’re going to find out how fucked up our sex laws are. I think that’s the point.
Hotlix,
I threw that in as an aside, or by net OT. It was more the arrogance of the police and the fawning of the people over the police, when AF have the most dangerous job of any American (the first danger just being the sea).
As for the main topic, it had nothing to do with it, thus an aside. As for our sex laws: statutory rape is wrong (if he/she looked of age, portrayed themselves as of age, and for God’s sake had an ID saying he/she was of age, there is no rape) unless underage is clear; the sexual offenders registry is just more punishment post incarceration; our arbitrary ages for sex are wrong (I’m for proximity, which means at 58 I can’t touch an 18 year old, but a 20 year old should not be punished for having sex with her 17 year old boyfriend); and we’re just stupid about prostitution. Which leads me to the ultimate Razzie award…
“Part of the problem is you never know when some jurisdiction is going to go ape shit over something and bring the boom down over something that until then has gone on unmolested.”
And that award goes to sexting, where some teenager sends a sexual picture to another teenager and we have child pornography, distribution of same, and teenage sex offenders, who are old enough to be tried as adults for their child porn. The law was to keep adults from sexually exploiting children, young children, not teenagers doing “I’ll show you mine”, but then again we have had at least one judge ruling that anime is child pornography if there’s TnA, must be that schoolgirl uniform so loved by the Japanese that so sways the judge and the DA that brought it to his attention. If we can’t punish teenagers for their sexuality, who can we punish? We need to punish someone…I vote for that slut that lived with seven short guys.
You mean this chick?
http://extremeavsclub.com/samples/snowwhite.jpg
Yeah, Sailor Barsoom, that’s the one.
Ariel, ah, so it seems we do agree on a number of points. I’m not entirely in support of age of consent laws, not as they are usually applied, but more like the Dutch or Brazilian application, where it is pretty much up to the young party or their parents to determine if they were taken advantage of or if they wanted the contact. Anyway, this can be argued endless, but you get to the point with . . .
@Ariel: “Which leads me to the ultimate Razzie award… And that award goes to sexting . . . ”
Absolutely. Not only given the vastly different prosecutorial response to this practice, depending on jurisdiction and the local prosecutor’s desire for publicity and notoriety, but the very idea that a person’s body — regardless of age — is not their own to conceal or display as they wish, in private and personal interaction. To me this is the ultimate intrusion of the state. If our body belongs to the state to regulate and control and criminalize, than we are mere chattels of the state.
We also have abuses of power, such as this previously reported on this blog (fortunately this cop was relieved of his duties):
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/blog/2012/11/21/cop-fired-after-ticketing-toddler-for-peeing-outside/index.html
@Ariel: “but then again we have had at least one judge ruling that anime is child pornography if there’s TnA”
This seems to fly directly in the face of how the Supreme Court ruled on the question of artistic or computer-generated sexual images of children where no actual children are involved:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=000&invol=00-795
We saw more sensibility demonstrated by the majority of the Justices in that ruling than we are otherwise used to seeing from all three branches of government at both the state and federal levels.
I do get into definitional issues about marriage, as well the terms husband and wife; I consider wife-wife and husband-husband as oxymorons. I would prefer new terms, while retaining the old as used traditionally. I do support the government acknowledging full privileges to civil unions. I just have a problem with terms.
However this “Perhaps the state might set up a basic framework within which individuals make their own marital agreements, and it is not up to the state to determine who can or cannot enter into a marital agreement or of what those agreements consist. And marital agreements should be enforceable, which they decidedly frequently are not today due to overarching meddling of the judiciary..” opens up a real can of worms, Heinlein fashion. I have no problem with brothers and sisters marrying so long as they had no knowledge beforehand of their relation; the eeewww factor only enters in for me if they did, or were raised together, the latter making a date for the prom so much easier of course. The problem with what you wrote is that it doesn’t make any distinction whatsoever. When I was in my 20s my mother was a gorgeous woman in her 30s (yeah, there’s a story there about a theater, seen it, took pictures, and a 49 Merc), so if we decided to make it something more it’s not up to the State or the neighbors? Real eeewww, but still within your parameters. Not mine, yours.
I use the B/S argument first because: one, there are couples in the US that can’t express “between two loving people” because they are exactly two people who fell in love with no knowledge of their sibling relationship but the State found out; and, two, because it usually leads to all sorts of back-pedaling on “it is not up to the state”. We all have our arbitrary lines, for which of course we all have reasons as to why they aren’t arbitrary. Genetics, God, eewww, whatever.
Society as represented by the State in this less than a Republic, has to set limits on this fundamental issue because it involves more than two people going home and decorating same. It involves all of society and where we want it to go. It’s not a Judiciary function, it’s Legislative. At this juncture, we are arriving at giving homosexuals full marital privilege. I may not like using the term marriage, but I do agree with the result.
The due process argument though is a category error.
@Ariel: “Real eeewww, but still within your parameters. Not mine, yours.”
Exactly my point. Just because something hits your eeewww factor does not mean it hits mine. And neither should your or my or anyone else’s eeewww factor determine whether two (or more than two, sorry if that also hits your eeewww factor) people of legal age wish to marry. No accounting for love, or whatever reason people have to marry one another.
@Ariel: “It’s not a Judiciary function, it’s Legislative . . . The due process argument though is a category error.”
The legislative branch sets the laws and framework, but it is the judiciary that interprets them. And it is the judiciary that often makes such a hash of things, as if the legislative hasn’t already made enough of a hash of them.
Have you ever had the rare “privilege” of taking a tour through so-called “family court” (sic)? Never mind what the law says. It is the judge who rules. And I can think of no other case in civil law where an agreement entered into between two competent people can be tossed out the window just because a judge feels like it. Believe me, been there (more times than I care to think about), done that.
Hotflix,
Oh, good, you don’t have the hot button limits I can usually hit with those examples (though I’m sure neither of us would contemplate marrying our mothers or consider it acceptable). The point I was making is that I can usually scratch someone with those examples to make them bleed from their own argument, but damn you had to be an outlier.
The legislative branch sets the course of the country, within the framework of the Constitution, not the judiciary. They interpret yes, and too often beyond their Constitutional limits, because they make shit up. The perfect example is “separate but equal”, where is that exactly anywhere in the Constitution (which includes all Amendments)?
Family court, another example of an oxymoron. As best I can determine, without having experienced it directly, it’s a court: where law is made daily; where when a woman violates an order (visitation) it has to be thoroughly reviewed taking months if not a year, but when a man violates an order (child support) it only takes a missed payment; where a mother is a better parent 8 out of ten times (even if the father took care of the children, but then again he was a bad provider) even if she abused the children because well she’s the mother so she can’t be an abuser. Family Court is a parody embracing more stereotypes than found in a Klavern, and does more damage.
@Ariel: “The point I was making is that I can usually scratch someone with those examples to make them bleed from their own argument, but damn you had to be an outlier.”
Yeah, that’s me — an outlier.
Actually, I try to be consistent in my views. They may not be mainstream (gosh, I hope they’re not mainstream!) but I at least try to be consistent.
You got it exactly right about so-called “family court.” It is an oxymoron, and the examples you cite are all too often exactly what goes on in them. They might be better terms “destruction of the family court.”
Well, they don’t call the Republicans the “Party of Stupid” for nothing!
I have found my understanding of the respective parties’ actions to be better grounded by this simple rule. Don’t judge them on the basis of what they want to leave free. Judge them on what they want to regulate and put under the government boot. Because what they want to regulate is what they find most important and what they want to leave free is least important to them.
For example, Republicans will tell you that the free market is most important and reducing regulations toward that end. But they would much rather spend their political capital on the War on Drugs, Prostitution and Abortion. Thus, their supposed “trademark” issues are the ones they are willing to trade away in conflicts with the Democrats, because they don’t really hold them as all that important. The free market and deregulation issues are just rhetorical clubs they use to bash Democrats over the head with in the name of efficiency. (I had hopes that the early Tea-Party would reform the Republicans with their emphasis on the fiscal issues, but the reversion of the late Tea-Party types to moral form has dashed those hopes.)
On the other hand, civil liberties, sexual choice, free speech, and all that are supposed to be the Democrats’ sacred cows, or at least, those that they want to leave free. But these take a back seat to what they want to control – namely your economic choices. Of course they are more than willing to use their sacred cows as a rhetorical club (Is there a literary prize for mixed metaphors?) but they don’t actually stand behind them as evidenced by PATRIOT, NDAA, the various incarnations of the DMCA and its internet adjuncts, not to mention the various “speech codes” enforced at public universities whose administrations and faculty are overwhelmingly on the left side of the spectrum. As Nat Hentoff put it, “Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee.”
And this is why I think that – after haunting this web-site for a couple of years – the acid test of one’s commitment to liberty is the question of prostitution. This is the intersection between the abstract* demarcation of personal liberty and economic liberty. The exchange of sexual services – nothing can be more personal than that – in return for economic remuneration is where those two aspects of liberty are entwined. And I don’t think that it is accidental that the majority of both parties comes down against it even if it is for distinct and separate reasons. It is because, in the final analysis, all their sacred cows and protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the mainstream of both parties is against liberty and for the expansion of the state. And until the parties are reformed to the point where they are willing to horsetrade what they want to control instead of what they supposedly want to leave free, that will never change. Both parties are statist authoritarians. That is where their treasure is. And their hearts, too.
*I say abstract because I think that liberty is in fact a whole and that loss of liberty in one sector will ultimately lead to its loss everywhere – a fact that is not lost on the statists of both parties.
I suddenly had this wild mental image of Barack Obama grabbing a cow by the the tail, swinging it up into the air (OK, a smallish cow), and whacking John Boehner over the head with it, all why making a speech.
And those silly critics say that mixed metaphors don’t have the power of “visualization!” Ha! I say, Ha!
c andrew, actually, I have to agree with much of your analysis on the major parties. And I do agree that they are both, ultimately, statist, and also self-serving and serving of the respective special interests to which both are beholden.
The radio commentator Alan Nathan says, “We want the Republicans out of our bedrooms, the Democrats out of our wallets and both out of our First and Second Amendment Rights.”
@c andrew: ” . . . the acid test of one’s commitment to liberty is the question of prostitution.”
I tend to agree with this, though I would extend that acid test to many of our sex laws in general. The whole issue should be one of consent, without parsing that word to the point where it is meaningless.
@c andrew: ” . . . I think that liberty is in fact a whole and that loss of liberty in one sector will ultimately lead to its loss everywhere . . . ”
Here, here . . . I heartily roger that!
Er… I think I’d like to wait for the next three or four generations of miniaturization before I try that.
On a different (and less painful) note: Suzi Favor-Hamilton is a cutie, I love that Nike commercial, and I’d’ve paid a pretty penny to be with her. Especially if I knew she were an Olympian. Though I wonder: are the nomadic harlots worried about losing business to the actual athletes? I mean, there are tens of thousands of them, too.