Getting to the heart of our more repressive legacies
Ruth Marcus, my least favorite and definitely the most self-righteous of the liberal or conservative commentators at the Washington Post writes this unhealthy harangue of David Vitter and Deborah Jean Palfrey, this morning that captures everything that is so wrong in the current more repressive direction for the country, these days.
Private Sin, Public Matter
Ruth basically argues that prostitution is a particularly heinous sin and crime and should be criminalized and that Vitter and Palfrey should hang for their sins.
I responded thus.
"You're right, Ruth. Someone needs to make the consistent case.
Prostitution should be legal. Palfrey should not be prosecuted. Vitter and men like him should not be prosecuted nor unelected. And the only thing standing between that much more realistic and decent policy and us is the vindictive prudishness of people like you who try to guilt men out of prostitution rather than build marriages which are built on mutual love and respect and not on the cynicism that animates too many marriages and too many bitter women's and men's attitudes towards love, sex, and life.
If people want to be bitter about love and sex, so be it, I say. But don't legislate it. And, in the meantime, people should stop taking the lazy way out of the marriage, relationship, and sexually-oriented problems that folks face and trying to enforce backwards legislation so that they don't have the face the bitterness in their own hearts that undermines their own marriages and relationships and sense of sexual intimacy and the marriages of all who get corrupted by their cynicism.
There is plenty of cynicism about sex and love, sadly. But the least of our problems occur between prostitutes and johns. Our most serious problems happen within marriages and relationships where self-righteous defensiveness about our own roles in problems and failures in marriage undermine a commitment to stronger marriages and facing those problems most honestly.
It is marriage and love and raising kids, ironically. where the clearest argument for a less regulated life and a life of free will and forgiveness taken seriously is made most easily.
If lovers and mates and parents think that they are going to reinforce their love with those whom they share their lives by forcing their loved ones to deal with their wrath or their moral authority, then they will live the consequences of that tragic little idea in their lives and relationships. If their bitterness and manipulation is practiced in their marriage, then that marriage might see adultery and prostitution and all kinds of issues creep up. If they want those issues to go away, they will need to start focusing on their own hearts and the hearts of their mates and how to open them up to one another and enjoy more genuine love between one another, instead of on the legislation. If they can't do that, then they will live with the bitterness and cynicism about love and marriage that pervades so much of America and the world, these days.
Luckily, Ruth, most young women my age seem to be figuring this one out and having much more functional and loving relationships, as a consequence. Young people tend to be much more laid back about prostitution, pornography, stripping, and sex and love, generally, which is sign of progress and a more loving, realistic embrace of all that is base in us as well as is great and noble in us. There are plenty of older people who resist this trend. And they will suffer with the relationships that such resistance offers. But the world seems to be working in a much more honest, decent, loving direction on this issue, which is exactly the direction they should be working in.
So opt out of the efforts to challenge the moral hypocrisy and be decent to this guy and this madam all you want, Ruth. It's a lonely party you've decided to attend. And it's lonely in those marriages where sexuality is treated with so much fragility and lack of appreciation for the needs and desires of men and women in relationships that they love. If you want to hang onto that legacy of loneliness and heartbreak, you feel free to.
I and most young people will be leaving that legacy behind us."
Love,
Ben
4 comments:
I think you might be missing the point. Ruth Marcus states that prostitution is illegal and repulsive. Think about it this way- is prostitution in its current, illegal form repulsive? A prostitute in today's America does not get a steady paycheck and there's certainly not a healthcare plan. Their working conditions are squalid at best, a back alley, the cab of a car, a dingy motel room. They are often the subjects of brutal attacks and this sort of thing goes unreported in the media because no one cares about another raped or murdered hooker. But prostitution will always exist and because of this, we should wake up, smell the crack smoke and legalize it. Make sure the women that choose this profession are paid honest wages and are protected from violence and disease.
At the moment, prostitution is illegal and as such, David Vitter broke the law. He would still be under scrutiny had he slammed heroin, driven drunk or robbed a bank. He broke the law. I don't think Vitter has ever made a public stand for or against sex work, but I hardly think a Senator that backed abstinence-only sex education and is vehemently opposed to same-sex unions would support the legalization of prostitution. The hypocrisy here is reminiscent of Ted Haggard- "damn you fags to hell, but excuse me while I go fuck a male hooker." Vitter has publicly spoken about marriage being a "sacred vow" and has said that "saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness." Here is a leader has chosen to force his narrow-minded morals on the masses, but in private goes against all of this. I don't think prosecution is the answer, but we do need to call out this hypocrisy in our leaders. We should question when there is such a dichotomy between their public lives and private ones. How can we trust someone like him to make important decisions for us? Ruth Marcus might be a "vindictive prude," but let's face it, Vitter is a hypocrite and a law-breaker.
-sara
Sarah,
Those concerns are true enough. You're right, especially, that we should call out Vitter on his hypocrisy. We ought to do it with decency towards Vitter and I ought to do it with decency towards Ruth (I changed my language, yesterday, when I thought about how harsh it was). And if that was all that was going on, here, then there probably would be very little controversy. It's the prosecution that is the issue, and Ruth is not just jumping on the bandwagon, she's basically advocating that both Vitter and this madam go down for this. And the irony, as I think you're getting at, Sarah, is that if someone's concerns are more substantive - prostitution is a much worse, more dangerous, and inescapably present business as long as it's illegal - then legalization promises the best path to changing that fact. It clearly did with the alcohol trade. And I think most prostitutes and porn actresses would agree that for all of the problems in the porn industry, it's a much cleaner, safer business because it's legal. You're exactly right:
"But prostitution will always exist and because of this, we should wake up, smell the crack smoke and legalize it. Make sure the women that choose this profession are paid honest wages and are protected from violence and disease."
And for these reasons, this is less concerning to me:
"At the moment, prostitution is illegal and as such, David Vitter broke the law. He would still be under scrutiny had he slammed heroin, driven drunk or robbed a bank. He broke the law."
Harriet Tubman spent her whole life breaking the law. And if someone had told her to work legally to end slavery but learn to respect the law in the meantime, I would hope that she would shrug her shoulders at the moral obtuseness of such a suggestion. A lot of very brave people ignored the Nuremberg laws and got Jews to freedom rather than turning them in, and that is what moral courage looks like. None of these people should be brought in. Or the charges just shouldn't be brought. Or the judges should learn to have the backbone to set it all aside. And if noone can have the courage or the discretion to do any of those things, then judges, Congress, or the President should have the backbone to put this thing to rest and the issue of prostitution to rest. As the President has demonstrated on Lewis Libby, when something is at stake that they really care about, someone will step up and challenge a ruling. In the meantime, the prosecution is clearly building the consensus for all of that and David Vitter and Deborah Jeane Palfrey get fried in the middle of it. The whole thing makes my stomach turn.
And here are the higher stakes involved here, Sarah. In Iran, homosexuality is illegal. And it is punishable by hanging. So by that reasoning, every gay man and woman in Tehran gets hanged until they change their laws and all those straight Iranians who turn them in, arrest them, prosecute them, and rule against them can claim they have no choice because the law is the law. In China, political dissent is illegal. So thousands of Chinese get slaughtered and imprisoned by their own government in 1989 because everyone felt like they had to uphold the law and noone has to take responsibility. The law is certainly not morally positive, necessarily. And neither is it morally neutral. And when it does harm rather than good, there is no moral obligation to obey it. And there is a long and proud history in American and civilized juris prudence of setting aside bad laws, not prosecuting them, and not enforcing them. And that is the tradition that should be taken up, today, if we had more courage. That is the beauty of the law, really. It is the perfect cover for all of our cowardice.
What America and the world needs to do, right now, is to give up the cowardice and have the courage to make these distinctions. There is plenty of discretion for cops, prosecutors, judges, lawmakers, executives and the like to do this because they've been doing it since the beginning of time. The whole illegal immigration debate is about just this issue, when we're being honest. And in the meantime, if we're all going to behave this way, then I got no issue calling it out so that we can eventually face up it and do the right thing rather than pretending that that is what we are doing today.
Ben
Benh,
Comparing Vitter to an abolitionist or someone fighting for a basic right like freedom of speech is...interesting. While I do see your point that many of our laws actually hurt us more than protect us, he probably wasn't feeling persecuted like someone in China when he went out and broke this particular law. I think "frisky" is the word. However, one can't compare someone like Vitter to Ted Bundy either. Engaging in prostitution could never be as offensive as something that very obviously violates someone else's rights, like murder.
I suppose I can be narrow-minded in my opinion of what the law is and how it should be applied. For example, in my mind, there isn't much of a difference between Phoolan Devi (the "bandit queen") and Aileen Wuornos (Florida serial killer). They were both murderers and that's hard to abide by. Sure, my feminist sisters might think I'm bowing down to the patriarchy by calling Devi a murderer instead of a "freedom fighter," but despite what some people might think of feminists, we don't sift every piece of information through some black and white belief system and then spit it back out as opinion. There are many shades of grey when it comes to the law and especially the definition of harm. You could argue that we only need laws that protect people from harm or violence, but everyone's definition of that is different. A lot of people, for whatever reason, think prostitution is harmful. Perhaps they believe it's a threat to family (and what does that mean anymore, anyway?) or it's a threat to personal safety. A great deal of them think it threatens their very soul or spirit. The beauty of the world and of our country, the beauty of people, is that we all have different opinions on these matters. I think Devi is a murderer, some people don't see it that way. You think some laws are bunk and meant to be broken, a lot of people don't see it that way. Many of the laws in place reflect the wants and wishes of the majority. You may not agree with that and I may not agree with that, but at the moment, it is reality. Not to say that things won't change because I still believe generations X and Y will make some positive social change. Just saying, prostitution is still illegal because a great deal of the people want it to be that way. It's illegal and Vitter did not engage in that particular activity as some kind of freedom-fighter. Dude isn't a hero.
I suppose had he come out and instead of giving the statement about loving his wife and God, he would have said "look y'all, I needed some action," I would have a more positive opinion on him. Seriously. I'm dying to hear a politician come out and say something honest for a change instead of some spin so they can maintain power. Maybe if he had come out and said that his actions were protesting what he believes to be limits on his freedom, I could actually respect him. As it stands though, he's just another hypocrite to me, another disappointing leader. I don't want his head on a stake and like I said, prefer that he not be prosecuted. The fundamental issue for a lot of people is his falseness and duplicity. A lot of people (like Ruth) want to bat around the morality issue, but I think the anger I feel about these things and the anger some right-wing conservative feels about these things comes from the same place. We're starving for some honesty and we're tired of not being able to trust the people we place in power. It's gotten so bad that people just assume now that all politicians are corrupt and talk about voting between evil and less evil instead of good and better. This issue is much bigger than Vitter or Palfrey.
I think we agree on several things here, such as how Vitter/Palfrey should be treated (really, nothing should be done), that prostitution should be legalized, that our leadership is lacking. Perhaps just different mental roads to come to those conclusions? The law, however, and how it's applied, that's a different story. I see the divide clearly between what he did and what someone like Tubman did.
-sara
Yeah, I don't think Vitter is Harriet Tubman. I also don't think the law is sacrosanct. And I've seen many positive developments to indicates that wiser heads with the law might be seeing that, too.
We just watched this really interesting discussion about the Dred Scott decision on C-SPAN, the other day, Sara, and it was interesting watching Stephen Brier get his head wrapped around the implications of that case. The law was clear. Fugitive slaves were to be returned to their owners and Dred Scott was a slave and must be returned to his owner. As a matter of law, it was pretty much an open and shut case.
It was also a bad decision by every historical and conceivable standard, because there was something more important than the law, at stake.
There are many places where the law is necessary and where it cannot be avoided because the stakes are too great to ignore the law.
But there is a long and valuable tradition in the U.S. of ignoring and turning a blind eye to many, many laws - laws against adultery, laws against contraception, laws against abortion, laws against sodomy and oral sex, laws against drugs, laws against all sorts of private behavior, good and bad - that did more harm and often very little if any good in liberal democratic societies.
These laws are the heart of such bad laws. Because they hide behind the lie that we tell ourselves and each other that more repressive efforts help in the efforts to curb bad behavior rather than making it and other similar behavior far more likely by raising the defenses of those who engage in it and by our failure to face that more honest reality.
What is at stake here is whether more genuinely good people will be able to engage in more honest and open efforts to deal with such issues, whether good people will more openly be able to address their own behavior, and whether we will be able to more constructively deal with the behavior of neighbors, friends, and family or whether more repressive efforts will forever take their toll and forever overwhelm better efforts, and, worse, never facing responsibility for that fact by explaining them away with the cynicism that nothing can be done, when more constructive efforts are most certainly available which can be engaged but which are overwhelmed by more aggressive and repressive efforts. That also happens to be much of the reason for the need for scholarly policy thought since about 90% of policy thought is seeing beyond the vitriol and lies and propaganda that pollute the world, and largely, I believe, out of that one oh-so-important lie that we tell ourselves and one another.
The stakes, here, are whether more repressive forms of democracy and more illiberal forces in the world will be able to overwhelm and, in some cases, literally attack - in the case of terrorists - more liberal forms of democracy or whether more repressive efforts will be forever rationalized no matter how bullshit their rationalization.
Terrorists use the very same rationalization for their activities - liberal values threaten our societies because more freedom means more bad behavior, which clearly is not true by any objective measure and is the reason that liberal societies are stronger societies than their more illiberal brethren - that more repressive folks use in the States to rationalize both the enforcement of such laws and their other various political activities (particularly, political pressure activities, terrorism just being a more brutal version of that rationalization of illiberal political activity).
The question that democracies face, today, is, "Are we going to continue the rationalization of our own political, legal, and other activities of conscience that perpetuate the rationalizations of terrorists, despots, and more illiberal actors, or are we going to continue to lie to ourselves and one another that it is our repression and not our liberal values that both make us stronger and which are our best and most constructive measure against the repressive zealotry that perpetuates 99% of the most serious ugliness in the world?"
The question, here, is much, much bigger than prostitution. But that question should have been resolved a long time ago by wiser heads had we not bought into this sad, counterproductive, and dishonest rationalization. The rationalization of johns going to prostitutes is bad enough. We don't need to keep up the case that Iran has going for itself for why it hangs homosexuals and why many people around the world stone johns and prostitutes to death. We can pretend that we are better because we only imprison them rather than stone them to death. But it is the same rationalization that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe offers Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran by arguing that he only imprisons his dissenters and journalists for a short time and releases them rather than imprisoning them for years as Ahmadinejad did to the student protesters in 1999. Now, clearly, Vitter is not Ahmad Batebi, one of those protestors who has spent more than 8 years in prison, now, since those protestors. But the rationalization for repression is the same. And if we want it to go away altogether rather than piecemeal, then we will have to make the more open, honest, case against more repressive measures, rather than perpetuate the rationalization and the lying that everyone engages in regularly that makes them possible.
The law really is the minor issue in today's debates and discussions. It has been treated as a more serious debate out of lack of recognition and out of cowardice to face this bigger issue. Some people are beginning to get their heads wrapped around that issue. Especially the big fat lie that laws have always applied equally or should be applied equally, as if none of these distinctions matter. That really is the biggest lie of them all. And reinforcing that lie doesn't make it better. It makes it worse.
What you said, here, Sara:We're starving for some honesty and we're tired of not being able to trust the people we place in power. It's gotten so bad that people just assume now that all politicians are corrupt and talk about voting between evil and less evil instead of good and better. This issue is much bigger than Vitter or Palfrey."
...is exactly right. Except that what keeps all of that shit in place is the punitive stakes involved. You take that away, and there is no reason for the lying. What keeps everyone, including Vitter, lying about this one, is the threat of punishment on the matter. That is how repression works and that is why is fucks our lives up so much.
Hitler was able to take advantage of this fact of middle class life and used the Nuremburg laws to reinforce that lie. And good people took so long to face that lie because it fell in nicely with their own lie to themselves, which is that they were better people than they really were and the fact that they didn't and still do not readily share their bad deeds, largely for fear of harsh consequences.
Now, that is true of places where the law clearly is needed, as well - murder or rape, for instance - but these are instances where the need to capture and hold someone is more important than our need to have people being immediately honest with themselves or one another about their bad behavior. We need them to be honest about their bad behavior with themselves and with others - which is why more retributive punishments like the death penalty undermine such efforts at healing for victims and perpetrators and are counterproductive as well as callous - but we need people safe from their violence, first.
Prostitution, on the other hand, may be a law that people will enforce because the law is on the books and police and prosecutors and judges and such want to keep their jobs. But that doesn't make the laws right. It means that people are being human, but not that the law is sacrosanct or necessarily should be treated as such. And more courageous folks for a long time have been setting aside and ignoring such laws, because they were bad laws. The modern right to privacy, which is the basis for Roe v. Wade and other important juris prudence, was arrived at by one of my favorite Supreme Court Justices, Bill Douglas, not because the Constitution explicitly provided for a right to privacy, but because Bill believed, and was right to believe, that a Connecticut law that forbade married couples from getting contraception was a bad law and that they Constitution should have something to say about that fact. Not because it really necessarily did, although Bill made a very valiant effort to argue that it did. But because it should. Most Supreme Court decisions, in fact, are arrived at based on what justices (and most judicial decisions, as well) are based on what justices think should occur and not necessarily based narrowly on what the law holds.
Ordinary police, prosecutors, and judges will act with less courage.
But the really good ones show some courage and learn to tell the difference between a good law and a bad law.
And right now is a political period where cowardice is trumping courage. And that is just a little bit more than bullshit, in my eyes.
There are many hopeful signs that this is on its way to a conclusion, hopefully sooner rather than later.
But in the meantime, many decent people get caught up in that web. David Vitter and Deborah Jean Palfrey are just two of those people. The stakes are much higher on this question, Sara, than just whether this poor soul does jail time for paying for a blowjob. This has much, much bigger implications for both liberal democracies and illiberal cultures and governments around the world. It also happens to be the underpinning of rationalizations for terrorism, genocide, despotism, and all of the worst forms of repression and human ugliness around the world.
That's why I take it so seriously. Had I not seen those connections when I first starting doing this work, I would have thought as most people do today, "Poor schmuck got his wee-wee put in jail." But, today, I see all too well the more important stakes involved, especially for here at home as much as for gay people or prostitutes or adulterers in Iran or Pakistan or Cuba or China.
And the lie can only take place for while. Hitler killed a lot of people with this lie for more than a decade. But democracies are getting smarter and need to get smarter, still, in dealing with this ugliness.
But the direction, at this point, is clear, because progress by any other name is a big fat lie.
And progress on this issue is people in government having the courage to set aside such laws and for people outside of government to convince others to stop passing them and their penalties.
Ben
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