Stardate 20030626.2148

(Captain's log): Charles writes:

I was struck by the privacy of butt sex being protected as long as it was 'noncommercial'. The ruling goes out of its way to exclude prostitution but seems to leave it open for covering most if not all of Santorums recent comment including incest.

I am sure others will say more than I care to know about this ruling, but what are your thoughts on commercial vs noncommercial. Why is it ok for people to do something for other reasons but not okay for them to do it if paid? It seems like an irrational bias against capitalism.

I haven't looked that the rulings, but I can fully understand why it is that the Supremes wanted to make sure they didn't open the floodgates of Hell by providing any grounds for a court case that laws banning prostitution were unconstitutional.

I'm in favor of legalizing prostitution, as long as it is done in a way which limits the spread of disease and protects the prostitutes from their clients and pimps, and makes sure that brothels don't end up being stables full of drug addicts. All of which seems to be possible.

Prostitution is legal in Nevada now, so there don't seem to be any constitutional issues regarding that one way or the other. It's entirely up to the states to decide whether to legalize prostitution; it isn't a protected right, but it also isn't something the US government can ban. (It ain't "interstate commerce".)

Nevada seems to have done a pretty good job of it, though there are some strange aspects of the way they've handled the whole thing. All licensed prostitutes in Nevada have to be examined weekly and given a blood test every month for venereal disease, and all sex is done with condoms. Since they're legal businesses, they don't have to skulk in corners or pay off cops or be subject to other forms of "protection"; they can have nice locations and operate quite openly. They even advertise.

Since the brothels are legal, you don't have the problem of the prostitutes being bullied by their pimps. (When prostitution is illegal, the prostitutes have no protection against their pimps, because if they get beaten up and go to the police, they could themselves then be arrested.)

All of which has made it so that it seems to work for everyone involved. The brothel owners have a nice business; the prostitutes make good money without dying young, and the customers can have a good time without breaking any laws or taking any major risk of getting infected with something. (And the state gets to tax it all.) Of course, it puts the noses of bluenoses out of joint, but Nevada has always been about selling sin, so it wasn't political suicide there for lawmakers to legalize it.

On the other hand, they embarked on this experiment about the time that Las Vegas was beginning its efforts to change its image from "Sin City" to "Family Playground", and the idea of whorehouses popping up in their city didn't really fit with the image. So Nevada's law limits brothels to counties whose populations are low, effectively banning them from all the big cities. In the case of Las Vegas, the nearest ones are about a 90-minute drive to the west in Nye County, in little towns with names like "Pahrump".

I confess I was curious, and I've driven by there on my way home from Vegas to look at a couple of them from the outside. They don't look too bad; they're trying for a more upscale approach, to deliberately avoid the kind of seedy back-alley image one would ordinarily associate with the concept. (And some of the women are stunning, at least to judge from their pictures.) I probably won't ever have the guts to actually patronize one of them, but I think it's pretty cool that they exist.

Nevada has led the nation in sin, anyway. For a very long time it was virtually the only place in the country where you could do that kind of gambling legally, which used to be their big draw. Ain't a lot in Nevada; about the only thing they ever really had to offer was services everyone else banned, and gambling and legal divorce used to be it.

It used to be really difficult to be granted a divorce in many states. But you could move to Nevada and live there for six weeks, establish legal residency, and get a divorce under Nevada's particularly liberal laws, whether your soon-to-be-ex-spouse agreed or not. If you're into reading old potboiler novels from the 30's and 40's, you might have run into a mention of someone "moving to Reno to get a divorce". But eventually the rest of the states liberalized their divorce laws, and that's no longer something Nevada has to sell. However, they retained their effective monopoly on big casino gambling for a lot longer.

Then, finally, you got Atlantic City, and Indian reservations, and gambling boats on the Mississippi and Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean, and a flood of other casinos, and now it's pretty common everywhere. Yes, it has brought problems with it; almost everything does. But for the most part it hasn't really caused the kinds of problems that some feared it would.

Given that recently Las Vegas decided that "Family Playground" was a bust (because families don't spend as much money as had been hoped) and has started moving back towards a sexier "Adult playg