Travesty: Abhisit Vejjajiva charged with 'murder'

[Velasco]

True. Ideally laws against selling sex should be considerably more forgiving, and laws against buying it commensurately sterner, than what I'm given to understand most countries actually have.

Why?  You'll just force a  lot of women to have to go to work for a living instead of getting huge easy incomes.  The guys can just go whack off, its not the end of the world for them, but for the ladies, it will be so unpleasant for them to see their income dwindle to 10-20% of its former level, for 5 times the number of hours.

Why do you wish to interfere at all in people's private sex lives?

It's surprising this praise of the easy money coming from someone who supposedly should be a fierce critic of the exploitation of the human beings by the merciless market laws. Because the sexual trade has more to see with the laws of supply and demand than with questions relative to private life or the free exercise of sexuality. There exists the demand of feminine bodies in the same ways that there exists demand for assassins of easy trigger or dealers to pass the drug. On the other hand, there always exists a convenient supply of desperate people arranged to earn easy money, given the lack of opportunities that exists in many societies. I guess that you aren't naive enough to believe that a relevant percentage of persons who devote themselves to prostitution works for pleasure. In an overwhelming majority of the cases, it's the money or the constraint (human trafficking).

[Velasco]

My point is that by imposing your moral judgments on sex workers you are hurting them. Marginalization and stigmatization of sex work (as opposed to treating it like any other work, and affording sex workers the same labor rights as other workers) because it offends your notions of what sex should be actively hurts them, because it denies them basic legal rights (protections against not being paid, workplace discrimination, abuse, rape by their clients, etc.). It's fine that you (and many others) define sex in that way, but by using that definition to inform public policy, you end up hurting the very "victims" you seek to protect. Essentially you are placing the protection of sex as this ideal over the protection of actual people in the sex worker industry.

With regards to your moral judgment point, I'm not sure how what you're proposing is any different from those that think that contraception and sodomy should be illegal (you presumably disagree with these people, yes?) because they deem it morally wrong and degrading to their ideal of sexuality?

Believe it or not, everybody has a sense of morality. Though serious differences of opinion exist, there is consensus over of some basic things: killing is bad; forcing people to do acts against their will, particularly in matters that concern the sexuality (rape, constraint to force women to exercise prostitution) too.

I understand (and to a certain extent I support it) the favorable point of view on legalizing the prostitution, when it affects persons that exercise it voluntarily. But the reality of the prostitution is so sinister that it produces stupor to me to see that someone argues that it's a question that only concerns different points of view on the morality. The exploitation exists, specially in this sector. A high percentage of the sexual workers in Europe are women and girls from the East, Latin America and other places led to the West with constraint and deceits. Many people works in prostitucion due to addictions or miserable living conditions. As someone has said before, sexuality is a serious matter. Certainly for me this subject goes beyond the debate between the puritanical or freethinking conceptions on the sexual morality.

The last phrase, regarding contraception and sodomy seems a bit ridicolous to me.

[Velasco]

As for the 'trafficking', obviously that's mostly a fiction designed to creat support for making prostitution illegal - the idea that someone would go to all the trouble of kidnapping someone when the good salary attracts sufficeient workers  is silly.

Must I answer this seriously? Please. In my country bands trafficking with women are dismantled frecuently: Russians, Ucranians, Brazilian... it's the same. Certainly the bands remain with the most of the income. Apparently it's a good business. Prostitution isn't illegal here, nor legal; simply it exists in a judicial limbo. Women working in prostitution aren't chased nor the owners of 'brothels' (Spain is plenty of them).

[Velasco]

Opebo, I won't question your knowledge of the situation in Thailand; I have never been there. I've read some press articles and watched some documentary in TV about prostitution and  pedophilia in Cambodia. Both serious matters. My impression is that the situation in the Khmer country is far away from being idyllic. On the other hand, I have no opinion on matters concerning the people's privacy.

[Velasco]

Lol! Jackson, are you a truth researcher or something?... I find that politicus' replies on this subject are excellent and, honestly, I can't find cracks in her argumentation -probably because I agree with her at almost 100%.