From DNAinfo.com:
If voting in Tuesday’s election isn’t enough to satisfy New Yorkers, an adult store is offering civic-minded Manhattanites a little something extra for pulling the lever.
Babeland, the female-friendly sex shop that has locations in and the Lower East Side, is giving away free vibrators to anyone who hits the polls on Election Day.
Former prostitute and current candidate for Governor of New York, Kristin Davis, has a running mate. Lawyer, Tanya Gendelman is running for lieutenant governor.
Davis and Gendelman (who says she is a bit more conservative than Davis) think that characterizing sex workers and adult-escorts as criminals and keeping the practice of prostitution illegal is doing more harm than good.
“First and foremost, it is a safety issue for women,” Gendelman said Thursday. “It puts women in vulnerable positions.”
Gendelman said that prostitution should be a consensual business arrangement, and women should legally be allowed to be prostitutes at the age of 21, despite the age of consent for sex in New York being 17. “[Legalizing prostitution] would curtail trafficking from other countries, and the use and abuse of women,” she said.
Criminalizing the practice of prostitution empowers pimps, encourages sex-traffickers and makes the women more susceptible to these peoples’ control, because the women are deemed criminals and can’t seek the help of law enforcement, Gendelman explained.
On Davis campaign web site, Davis says that she “find[s] it stunning that this nation still regards prostitution as a crime. It’s sad that we waste our cops and courts trying to stamp it out, as if a good spin through the justice system will instill miscreants with the morals necessary to fly right. In this case, law enforcement is ineffective to the point of absurdity. Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession for a reason: it will always occur.”
That sounds good, but equality for women is sadly a long way off. Before prostitution is legal, many more women will have to get really pissed off about being treated as second class citizens without the capacity to think and make decisions for themselves. We’re just not there yet.
Suffolk County, New York is going to create a registry for people who abuse animals.
From HuffPo:
Suffolk County, on the eastern half of Long Island, moved to create the nation’s first animal abuse registry this week, requiring people convicted of cruelty to animals to register or face jail time and fines.
And what is the reasoning used to justify a data base so people can find out who in their community have been abusing animals?
We know there is a very strong correlation between animal abuse and domestic violence,” said Suffolk County legislator Jon Cooper, the bill’s sponsor. “Almost every serial killer starts out by torturing animals, so in a strange sense we could end up protecting the lives of people.”
Yep. Since some serial killers started out as animal abusers, it only stands to reason that people would want to know which of their neighbors are potential serial killers. I propose that we start a registry for short, skinny, messianic, long haired, vagrants because we all know that they have a tendency to attract followers, whom they refer to as their “family”, and murder movie stars and rich people.
I bookmarked this story last week, so it’s a little old, but it’s interesting to note that, of all the mainstream media coverage I saw of this story, not one questioned the utter paranoia and irrationality exhibited by such an act or idiocy. What does it mean when new outlets report stories like this with a straight face?
I’ve been meaning to post this for several days.
According to NBC12.com:
A New York man who served a year behind bars for attempted sexual abuse 14 years ago is heading back to prison for failing to report his new address under a bridge.
After pleading guilty for the felony count of failing to register, he now faces 1-3 years behind bars.
Credit for the link goes to Sex Offender Research, an excellent source of news on that topic.
Former prostitute turned elementary school teacher Melissa Petro was apparently ordered removed from her teaching position by none other than New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. According to UPI:
“What our legal rights are, whether she broke the law in terms of applying and getting tenure or whether the system just broke down, that’s being investigated,” Bloomberg said in the Post report.
Ms Petro made the egregious mistake of admitting to having once been a prostitute in a column she wrote for the Huffington Post that criticized the war against Craigslist.
As an example of someone who has left her past behind and created a new future outside the sex busines, the rescue industry has been strangely quiet about the public attacks leveled against her and her suspension from teaching. One can only guess why none of those organizations who so strongly proclaim to be looking out for the welfare of women and children, and who insist that all prostitution is exploitation, wouldn’t be there standing by her side to proclaim that Ms. Petro was a victim and that she shouldn’t be condemned for a past that wasn’t her fault.
No one even knows if she’s broken any laws (although you can bet they’re working feverishly to pin something on her). It’s not like they suddenly discovered she misbehaved in her classroom and are acting to protect the kids. As it stands right now, she simply made the mistake of exercising her First Amendment rights. Do women lose their rights when they become teachers? Why aren’t woman’s rights groups raising a shit storm over her treatment?
Oh, wait. I forgot. Respect and free speech rights are reserved for women who have the right attitude. She sacrificed that when she spoke out against the wrong people. I’m pretty certain that her past history would be of much less consequence had she simply cowered under the pressure of popular opinion and adopted a more morally righteous stance toward the demon Craigslist. If the local school administrators suggested she write under a pseudonym, then they clearly knew of her history and didn’t consider it a problem. That leaves only her position on the topic that is making her a target for attack now.
I suspect she will ultimately be fired for giving voice to her opinions. It would be unfortunate if she were forced back into prostitution, but at least she would probably be in the company of a better class of people.
Sometimes it just gets too funny not to laugh. CBS has apparently rounded up just about every photo on the internet that shows Bronx prostitute turned school teacher, Melissa Petro and assembled them into one gallery.
The way I see it, Fox News set a new standard when it invented the popular strategy of delivering massive doses of moral indignation illustrated with an equal measure of low-cut and leggy female eye candy.
Not to be outdone, other mainstream news outlets jumped on the bandwagon, rolling out as much cheap sensationalism as possible. Maybe some start up will come in and start delivering objective news reporting. Wow. What a novel idea that would be.
According to the New York Times, the Bronx teacher who wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the recent crusade to censor Craigslist has been reassigned.
She said that she used Craigslist to meet men and it provided “a simple, familiar forum through which I could do my business with complete anonymity, from the safety and convenience of my own home.”
[...]
Ms. Petro was hired as a teacher in August 2007, a spokeswoman for the city Education Department, Natalie Ravitz, wrote in an e-mail on Sunday. She said that Ms. Petro worked at Public School 70 in the Bronx and had tenure.
It will be interesting to see if her tenure saves her job. Being opposed to the war on Craigslist practically brands her as someone who favors the child sex slave industry. The idea that the anti-prostitution movement is going to permit her to have contact with children in an official capacity doesn’t seem likely.
In fact, they are probably already counting kids to find out how many went missing since she started teaching.
So, at the same time as CNN was an enthusiastic participant of the lynch mob attacks on Craig’s List for promoting exploitation of women, it was simultaneously busy producing a new talk show co-staring the former Governor of New York and infamous patron of high end prostitutes, Elliot Spitzer.
Nice work, CNN.
Nothing gets under the skin of culture conformists like the rebellious trend of wearing one’s pants so low that their underwear is exposed, also known as sagging.
The latest installment in this ongoing movement to legislate style comes out of Georgia:
On Tuesday, Dublin Mayor Phil Best signed an ordinance adopted by the City Council that makes it a violation of the city code to have saggy pants.
But the trend, popularized by hip hop artists dates back to the 90s with legislation to ban the practice starting in Louisiana and spreading to other localities.
As the New York times points out in this 2007 article, saggy pants is largely an African American trend rasing the question that banning the practice has racial overtones, although many of the ordinances are sponsored by black officials. The article draws a parallel with another style rebellion:
Not since the zoot suit has a style been greeted with such strong disapproval. The exaggerated boxy long coat and tight-cuffed pants, started in the 1930s, was the emblematic style of a subculture of young urban minorities. It was viewed as unpatriotic and flouted a fabric conservation order during World War II. The clothing was at the center of what were called Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, racially motivated beatings of Hispanic youths by sailors. The youths were stripped of their garments, which were burned in the street.
Earlier this year a New York Court struck down ordinances banning baggy pants, but cities in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Michigan continue to outlaw the style in the name of public decency. Laws to ban the trend have also been proposed at the state level.
So what does all this say? Well, for one thing, it certainly makes it clear that freedom of expression is only secure if the public and the courts are willing to defend it. If a style of dress can be banned, then no expression is safe. The First Amendment is not there to protect what we like. It’s there to protect what we don’t like and any legislator, whether it be at the city, state, or national level, that votes to abridge free expression, is violating their oath to preserve and protect the Constitution.
If the motivation for the trend is rebelliousness, then it has been a rip roaring success, because it clearly causes a great deal of anxiety among the more conservative elements of society. And the very fact that it makes people uncomfortable highlights their insecurity and fear of anyone not like them.
But, when you cut through the irrational claims, the fact remains that how you dress threatens absolutely no one.
The Crime Report has an interesting story about New York’s law against “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense”.
And that was pretty much it. The officer didn’t hear her say anything; nor did he ask any of the men he saw her talking to what she had said. That didn’t faze the assistant district attorney, who attempted to get condoms found in the defendant’s purse admitted as evidence.
Of course, prostitution has migrated from the street to the internet:
Before the Internet, vice cops had it relatively easy. Most cities had specific areas known for street prostitution where undercover officers posing as johns could chat up a lady, strike a deal to pay for a sex act, and then pull out the cuffs. But in the last decade, the oldest profession has “gone high-tech,” says Jaime Ayala, Deputy Chief of Police in Arlington, Texas.
Gee, one would think that getting it off the street would be a good thing…
And then there’s the obligatory reference to Craig’s List. Of course, no one really knows how many women and children are actually victimized by Craig’s List, but you can be certain it’s “a lot”.
Anyone who has perused the adult sections of Craigslist or Backpage knows that men and women (and boys and girls) advertise their sexual services online. What this means for police is a lot more legwork. At the same time, a rise in awareness about the ugly world of human trafficking, where women from abroad—and, in some cases, American children—are held hostage in brothels disguised as massage parlors, has shifted law enforcement focus and resources away from traditional vice work, according to many attorneys.
These days, most vice work is simply tricking someone into committing a “crime”. Pardon my skepticism that the internet makes it more difficult for cops to arrest prostitutes. If anything, it makes it easy to set up a sting without even having to leave the office until you’re ready to spring the trap.
The Prostitution Free Zone is a novel idea that codifies the crime of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” by permitting cops to arrest anyone with a prior record of prostitution who happen to be in the PFZ.
Washington, D.C. also created PFZs in 2006. But, according to Professor John Copacino of the Georgetown University Criminal Justice Clinic, the district “gets around the constitutionality” by making the zones temporary: they can be in effect for just 10 days at a time. Portions of the district’s downtown area were declared PFZs during the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009.
I guess it’s ok to suspend people’s Constitutional rights if it’s only in ten day chunks. And then there are the folks who just want to get laid without having to ante up the cash:
Georgetown’s Copacino also sees problems. Standing around, even propositioning potential (non-paying) sexual partners while wearing a short skirt and stilettos, is not illegal. “You can’t criminalize normal behavior, ” says Copacino.
It gets worse:
The problem, says [Portland defense attorney Elizabeth Wakefield], is that the city is now issuing many of these charges as violations rather than crimes, which under Oregon law means that the defendants don’t qualify for court-appointed counsel who could encourage them to challenge the arrest.
Poor people = fair game.
