Oh good! I'm glad to see this bill come to the floor. I know this is one of those controversial moral issues with strong opinions on both sides, so there will probably be debate and I welcome that. I want to start by saying, though, that I don't see this as an issue between supporting or opposing sex work. Instead, I see it as an issue between getting something out in the open where we can monitor, regulate, and keep track of it so we know that everyone is being treated well, or trying to ban something that governments have tried to ban unsuccessfully for pretty much all of human history and having the unintended consequence of keeping it all in the shadows, making life worse for the people who still end up doing it.
The main problem with the ban on sex work is that when something is banned, that means it isn't regulated. Facilities are more likely to be dirty, workers are more likely to be victimized or taken advantage of by their employers or clients, and when those things happen, they are afraid to go to the police because the work they are doing is against the law. This is something that I firmly believe needs to be legalized and regulated by the government. Sex work isn't going away. Those kinds of desires are in our biology, whether its wanting human contact or whatever. I'm not going to judge sex workers or the people that pay money to see them. The thing that bothers me about prostitution is when people are taken advantage of and feel like they have nowhere to turn. I think Atlasia needs a policy that treats everyone involved as the human beings that they are, while ensuring strong regulations in the name of public safety and individual protections.
In full disclosure, I shamelessly used 2 bills that were written about 4 years or so that I thought were really done. Some parts of the bill are pretty much straight up taken from those and other parts I modified, removed, or added things in order to make it my own. I hope that the people who wrote and worked on those bills won't be offended by that.
