Another Day, Another Politician Gets Busted
Posted by Mr. Practical on March 10, 2008
News broke today that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has admitted to being involved with a prostitution ring. The leader of Republicans in the state assembly, James Tedisco, issued a statement demanding that Spitzer, a Democrat, resign. “He has disgraced his office and the entire state of New York,” Tedisco said.
This really cracks me up. I am certain there are hundreds of politicians right now calling for his resignation publicly, while privately breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t them that got popped. You just know a very high percentage of politicians partake in this same extramarital activity.
Okay, he IS married, so he shouldn’t have been dipping his pen in some very expensive ink. But I have one question that has never been satisfactorily answered: Why can’t I, as a single man, legally purchase the services of a prostitute? If there is a willing buyer and a willing seller and both are consenting adults, why does our government tell us we can’t partake in such a transaction?
Especially when the use of prostitutes is probably less expensive than, you know, a relationship.
March 10, 2008 at 4:38 pm
You have raised many interesting points. I’ll comment on just a few.
It’s difficult to feel sorry for Eliot Spitzer. Before he was elected Governor of New York, he served as the state’s attorney general. He used the powers of his office far more aggressively than anyone had used them. He filed suit against individuals and corporations who had been engaging in lawful activities. When you are sued by the state’s attorney general, you have to spend vast amounts of money on lawyers. You are also encouraged to settle the lawsuit because having to pay the full amount claimed (generally many millions of dollars), it would bankrupt you. This gives unsavory attorneys general the ability to extort settlements even from people who didn’t do anything wrong.
But back to the fun stuff, I don’t think the state should be able to criminalize consensual transactions between adults, unless those transactions actually hurt someone. And I don’t mean some vague BS kind of hurt.
That said, I doubt any state in the US will legalize prostitution in the coming several decades. Very few state legislators would be willing to take the political heat for doing so. They would be caught between religious fundamentalists on one side and feminists on the other side.
The religious fundamentalists would hit them for legalizing something that their religion regards as a sin. The feminists would hit them for legalizing something that might exploit women or spread disease. At least that’s what they would say. I think one of the real reasons is that most women just regard prostitution as icky.
Also, they don’t want their husbands to have the legal option to drop by the brothel on the way home from work for another reason. I suspect that many women would like to keep it more difficult for their husbands to get sex from anyone except them because it gives them more power in the marriage.
Many women use sex as a relationship tool. They grant sex to reward their husbands for doing something they like, and they withhold sex to compel their husbands to do something the husbands aren’t doing at present.
Wives sex strikes have been used in many countries. Here is a good rundown of them.
http://www.amrep.org/lysistrata/ages.html
A husband going to a prostitute when his wife won’t give him sex (I’m not saying that is the case with Eliot Spitzer) can be viewed a bit like an employer hiring strikebreaking workers after its regular workers went out on strike. The regular workers on the picket line hate strikebreakers. That’s why all the violence against them. The company wants to keep producing its product. It doesn’t want its employees to be able to hire strikebreaking replacement workers. Likewise, the wives don’t want their husbands to be able to get sex anywhere else.
March 10, 2008 at 10:22 pm
SEX STRIKES?!?! As if it isn’t hard enough to get sex from your wife. My buddy who’s married to a terrific girl still complains about his lack of action. After they had one kid, he decided to tell her he wanted another.
“You really want another child?” I asked.
“No, I just want some friggin’ sex!” He was serious.