Nobody's Business

Denying the free will of prostitutes

When Dave Krueger of the currently-dormant Sex Hysteria blog first suggested Maggie McNeill as a contributor to Nobody’s Business, I was a bit hesitant. I was concerned that bringing aboard an ex-prostitute blogger would seem like a trashy stunt to boost our traffic stats. I’d read enough of Maggie’s Honest Courtesan blog to know that she brought real substance to the subject, but I was worried about appearances. So far, however, no one has complained. (It would have been nice to get that boost to our traffic stats, but that hasn’t happened either.)

The main reason I wanted her to write for us is that we libertarian bloggers tend to be obsessed with the war on drugs — because that’s where most of the action is — and consequently we don’t pay enough attention to other classes of consensual crimes, such as those covering prostitution and other kinds of sex work. I figured Maggie would help remedy that.

I had an ulterior motive as well. I don’t tell Maggie what to write about, but one of the things I was hoping she would do for us is bring some legitimacy to the libertarian position on prostitution. The problem is that most libertarian groups are overwhelmingly male, which makes it pretty easy to launch an ad hominem attack on our views of prostitution.

You see, I’ve written about the subject before, and there’s a certain response that I have trouble dealing with. A few years ago I wrote a series of posts in response to an opinion piece by Melissa Farley and Norma Ramos which argued that Eliot Spitzer should have been prosecuted. I have no love for Spitzer, but I thought Farley and Ramos’s reasons for wanting him prosecuted were dead wrong, mostly because they seemed unable to understand the difference between choice and coercion when it came to prostitution.

The last post in the series drew a comment which included this:

Libertarianism is an ideology devised by and for white, heterosexual, middle-class (or higher) males (and I’m guessing you’re one of them too, Mr Draughn) to justify their reluctance to get off their asses and help those, who are underprivileged, under the guise of ‘freedom of choice’…

This kind of accusation is hard to respond to. The commenter was arguing that my libertarianism was just a self-serving guise for my secret real motives. How do you refute that? Heck, why do my motives even matter? I took a shot at a response, but I’ve always known that it was kind of futile, because even if I somehow prove I’m not lying, the fallback argument is almost certain to be that, as a privileged white male, I just don’t “get it.”

So I was kind of hoping that by having Maggie aboard, it would bring some credibility to the libertarian position on sex work. After all, Maggie is a woman, and she’s been a prostitute, so I’m pretty sure she “gets it.”

I should have known better. As Maggie points out on her other blog in a post about migrant prostitutes:

Not to be outdone, the fanatics are now trying to claim that the reason migrants deny being enslaved is not because it’s the truth, but rather because they’re suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”! They simply cannot accept that some people really do prefer doing sex work to being virtual slaves in a sweatshop, and that they migrate not because they’re passively “trafficked” but because they’re actively looking for a better life than they could find in their own countries.

And in the comments, Maggie talks about the response to people like herself:

You may notice that a lot of prohibitionists now (not so much the sincere trafficking believers, but rather the cops, politicians and neofeminists who use it as an excuse for war on whores) feel compelled to call us liars and claim that voluntary adult prostitutes are “rare” when actually we’re the vast majority.

Brainwashing and Stockholm syndrome may seem a little far fetched, but when you advocate prohibiting prostitution on the grounds that it exploits women, then prostitutes who freely consented to sex work are kind of a problem for your argument. Thus, in hope of invalidating and marginalizing such women, prohibitionists try to take the traditional exceptions to consent and apply them to prostitutes.

Arguably the most general purpose tool for denying the validity of consent is claiming that children are involved, and the anti-prostitution argument has been using it forever. Many anti-prostitution laws are justified in the name of protecting children from sex slavery, even though no one argues that children should be allowed to prostitute themselves, and the laws apply to consenting adults as well.

So we’ve seen prostitution prohibitionists claim that women are coerced and brainwashed, and we’ve seen them claim it’s all “for the children.” What else is there? What other conditions that traditionally invalidate informed consent could be pulled into the argument?

Oh yeah, mental illness. Here’s Maggie again:

The general consensus among Victorian “scholars” was that normal women had no sex drive whatsoever, so it was therefore impossible for any normal woman to choose to be a prostitute. Some argued that all whores were driven to the trade by extreme privation or forced into it by pimps, while others claimed it was due to “laziness” and a desire to avoid “real work”. But the most popular view of all was that whores were atavisms, throwbacks to a more primitive human type, and many a 19^th-century researcher (especially in Germany, Italy and Russia) eagerly sought prostitutes (always streetwalkers, of course) who would allow themselves to be studied and measured; Cesare Lombruso of Italy claimed that all prostitutes, without exception, had receding foreheads and large jaws, and that some had “exaggerated” growth of the labia or clitoris. He and his cronies claimed that this cherry-picked “evidence” proved that “primitive” African and American Indian women shared these same features, thus demonstrating that whores were more like “savages” than like highly-evolved Europeans. And since prostitutes were primitive they were also stupid, and thus incompetent to make their own decisions; this of course was used to excuse tyranny like the Contagious Disease Acts discussed in yesterday’s column, because the government could claim it was forced to arrest, incarcerate and “rehabilitate” prostitutes “for their own good.”

I’m too lazy to look, but I’m sure somebody has already revitalized the mental illness argument for the new prohibition — what Maggie refers to as the neofeminist anti-prostitution movement — arguing that prostitutes are often mentally disturbed, probably because of abuse as children, no doubt.

Sigh. There’s no winning this argument, is there? I’m wrong about prostitution being a victimless crime because I’m a privileged white male. And Maggie is wrong about prostitution being a victimless crime because she’s been brainwashed by people like me. Or lying. Or mentally ill. The proof that she’s brainwashed, lying, or mentally ill is that she believes prostitution is a victimless crime

This is the same quality of evidence and argument that you get from a 9/11 truther: If you disagree, you’re either part of the conspiracy, too stupid to understand, or being duped by the conspiracy. The content of your argument doesn’t matter. It’s a difficult argument to dispute, not because it’s so good, but because it’s so vacuous.

Roads

I’ve been on a road trip from Chicago to the east coast and back, and along the way I’ve been looking for something I can make into a libertarian lesson. For example, I could write about the poor selection of products at the rest stops along the limited access turnpike, which is an illustration of the problems that come with a government-created monopoly. There are probably a couple of other things like that. But what I finally settled on is the roads themselves.

The highways, expressways, interstates, turnpikes, toll roads, and back roads are all government-built. From time-to-time, this fact leads to someone trotting out a criticism of libertarianism that basically goes something like this:

You’re a libertarian, right? But you use roads, right? Gotcha. Roads are built by governments! Paid for by taxes! Ha, ha! Stupid libertarians.

Yeah, Einstein, you got us. We use roads that are built by the government and funded through taxation. You have totally pwned us, and we are now powerless to object to your beloved government’s regulation of vehicle fuel economy, seat belts, air bags, window tinting, and motorcycle helmets. Also banking, credit cards, investments, stock and commodity markets, corporate leave policies, accounting rules, hiring policies, agricultural production, and net neutrality. And then there’s gambling, drugs (both medical and recreational), liquor, prostitution, obscenity, television and radio content, and cash transaction reporting.

And don’t forget roofing tiles, lawn maintenance, campaign contributions, high school and college athletics, residential rents, taxicabs licenses, beautician licenses, florist licenses, cable television monopolies, tariffs, immigration quotas, zoning, landmarks, employment policies, and whether or not gas stations can have locking pump handles.

Sigh.

Just because there are some government activities that are legitimate and useful doesn’t mean that you get to sneak all the rest of that bullshit past us.

It is, but it isn’t

Most of you probably heard about the court proceedings on prostitution law which were held in Ontario last week, and you may be a bit confused about what’s going on. Prostitution is, after all, legal in Canada, so what’s the fuss about? The problem is that prostitution isn’t actually legal in Canada, at least not in the way most people intuitively use that word; it’s merely legalized, which is a horse of a different color. So I figured an essay explaining what’s really going on up there and why might be welcome.

First of all, you must understand that the way the terms “legalized” and “decriminalized” are used in reference to prostitution is the opposite of the way they’re used in regard to drugs. When people speak of marijuana being “decriminalized” they mean that merely having it won’t get you jail time, but there are still all sorts of laws surrounding it (sometimes even fines for possession); “legalization” basically means what it sounds like. In prostitution, on the other hand, “decriminalization” means that transactional sex is viewed as an arrangement between consenting adults in which the state has no legitimate interest (basically like any other sex), whereas “legalization” means it is viewed as a special case and therefore subject to all sorts of laws that aren’t applied to other professions. For example, prostitution is legalized in Nevada; it’s legal if one does it in certain counties, in a licensed brothel owned by somebody else, and follows a slate of rules so restrictive that about 70% of Nevada prostitutes prefer to work illegally.

Nevada is also a good example of the highly arbitrary character of regulations under legalization schemes; in Canada and the U.K. brothels are banned, but in Nevada they’re the only venue for prostitution that is allowed! Most European legalization regimes are much more liberal, and those in Australia aren’t tremendously different from full decriminalization (which is what New Zealand has). But in Canada the laws were designed to make prostitution de facto illegal by forbidding most things prostitutes do, despite the fact that the work has never been de jure illegal.

The social purity movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries which resulted in the universal criminalization of prostitution in the U.S. was not so popular in Canada, and most Canadian laws surrounding the trade tended to focus on the perceived “social ills” of prostitution rather than on the activity itself, which was never actually criminalized. The three most important of these laws are prohibitions against “keeping a bawdy house” (relatively unchanged since 1892), “communicating for the purpose of prostitution” (largely reworked in 1985 to expand police powers in response to public complaints about streetwalkers) and “living off the avails of prostitution” (amended in 1997 in response to early “human trafficking” hysteria). The first of these makes it illegal for a prostitute to have one place in which she habitually sees clients, the second forbids any public communication (soliciting or advertising) of services, and the third makes it illegal for any individual to “live wholly or in part on the avails of prostitution of another person” (i.e. to derive any regular income from a prostitute).

The problem with all three of these laws is that, no matter what their intent might have been, they make prostitution much more dangerous. Brothels allow groups of prostitutes to work together for mutual safety, and even a hooker who chooses to work alone is safer in a place she chooses herself (“incall”) than in a place designated by the client (“outcall”). The second law has a disproportionate effect on streetwalkers; though it forbids escorts from advertising it does not prohibit private conversations on the subject, and is therefore more of a nuisance to them than a danger. But because 90% of all Canadian sex-work prosecutions are due to this law, streetwalkers try to avoid attracting police attention by moving into dimly-lit side streets and conducting negotiations quickly…thus robbing them of the ability to properly assess a customer before jumping into his car. For escorts, the third law is the worst one; though its supporters invariably describe it as an “anti-pimping law”, escorts almost never have pimps and the law can be used against any adult who derives regular income from a prostitute, thus criminalizing invalid parents, university-age dependent children, husbands, boyfriends, roommates and employees (such as maids, secretaries or bodyguards) and rendering them vulnerable to felony charges punishable by up to ten years in prison.

But on September 28^th of last year, Justice Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court decided in favor of three sex workers by ruling that these three laws in particular violated the Canadian Charter of Rights by increasing the danger prostitutes face without a compelling reason for doing so. Predictably, the government appealed, but what was not predictable was the language in which that appeal was framed: government lawyers argued that since prostitution is “inherently dangerous”, Parliament has the right to artificially increase that danger with restrictive legislation. This is such an absurd concept, one almost has to wonder if the government isn’t trying to lose the appeal; public opinion is running about 70% in favor of decriminalization (and editorial opinion even higher) since the argument was publicized in March, and on the first day of the hearing the head of the appeals panel repeatedly interrupted Crown Counsel Michael Morris with questions like, “Isn’t it self-evident the laws produce harm and don’t protect sex workers?” and “If its legal, why would you want to make it impossible for them to work – isn’t this like passing a law to prevent store owners installing security?”

The judge is of course correct, but it’s surprising to hear such a lucid viewpoint verbalized by anyone in power virtually anywhere in North America. It may be some time before the judges announce their verdict, and even if Himel’s ruling is upheld the government will certainly appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court. But it’s heartening that prostitutes are finally being allowed to speak the truth in a highly-public venue about the damage done by the repression of our trade, and whatever the outcome those truths might eventually influence public discourse in Canada’s chronically-uptight southern neighbor.

“No Knock Raid”

Most of you have probably already seen this, but as I’m taking a bit of a break for the next week or so, I thought I’d leave you with it.

Warning: This music video features camera footage of actual SWAT raids where actual SWAT team members kill people, shoot dogs, and terrify children. It may be a little tough to take.

But don’t worry America, it’s just the War On Drugs as usual.

Stories of consensual crime enforcement

If you read Radley Balko’s excellent Agitator blog (which you should) or one of the legal blogs which covers the injustices of our legal system, such as Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice, you’re probably aware of the various ways in which the police, the prosecutors, and the courts are trampling all over our rights. I’m talking about civil asset forfeiture, violent SWAT home invasions, intrusive and often secret investigations of ordinary American lives, along with a general militarization of the police, and erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

I run into a fair number of people in the blogosphere and in real life who are aware of these problems — and who are angered by them — and yet they think that legalizing consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, gambling) is a dangerous fringe idea. This surprises me, because I’ve long thought that these two issues were related. Police and prosecutors trample on our civil liberties, in large part, because of the laws on consensual crimes.

It happens because consensual crimes present a unique enforcement problem: There is no complaining witness, no victim. Everybody on all sides of these illegal transactions wants to keep the police from finding out about them. Which means that a big part of any police investigation of consensual crime is proving that a crime happened at all. This requires a style of investigation that evolves with almost no voluntary cooperation from the community. So in order to succeed, police have to use enforcement tactics that are sneaky, deceptive, coercive, and violent. Almost every overbearing tactic introduced by the police in the last 40 years is due to the enforcement of laws against consensual crimes, such as prostitution and gambling. But mostly, of course, because of the need to enforce the war on drugs.

I was reminded of this on May 23, when Jennifer Abel explained the Patriot Act to the Brits in the Guardian. She had this nice quote from the ACLU:

Most of the changes to surveillance law made by the Patriot Act were part of a longstanding law enforcement wishlist that had been previously rejected by Congress, in some cases repeatedly.

This was obvious to a lot of people at the time. Here is Instapundit Glenn Reynolds on the Patriot Act, before it became the Patriot Act:

This stuff isn’t patriotism. It’s bureaucratic opportunism. All sorts of stuff will come out of the closet, get dusted off, and be relabeled a “response to the terrorist attacks” even though it has nothing to do with them and was sought by bureaucrats for their own reasons long before.

Clearly, if these laws were sought after by government agencies and law enforcement long before 9/11, then they had little do do with terrorism and everything to do with our government’s usual obsession: Drugs.

As Jennifer put it:

The first thing you need to understand about the Patriot Act is this: Osama Bin Laden’s destruction of the World Trade Centre wasn’t the reason the act was passed; it was merely the excuse. The real reason dates back to the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan demonstrated his principled commitment to personal liberty and small government by turning the “war on drugs” up to 11.

Of course, the constitution as it’s written makes drug laws difficult to enforce. Police learn about most crimes – real crimes – when the victims report them to the police. But there’s no victim to complain when a willing buyer purchases a product from a willing seller, so drug cops looking to make arrests and justify their existence had to resort to privacy violations and fishing expeditions instead.

Then came the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the most horrific in my country’s history. But it was also the answer to every drug warrior’s prayers: they finally got the unconstitutional powers they craved, and under a spiffy patriotic acronym to boot.

The Patriot act was only one of many ways the government has trampled our rights in the War on Drugs, and I think the link between consensual crime and our increasingly abusive police state is pretty obvious.

To explore this link a bit, I decided to spend a month keeping track of all the stories I found in my daily reading that were about abuses of our rights in the name of fighting consensual crime. The list is hardly exhaustive, and some of these events took place before the month in question but were reported during it (just as some of the events that took place during the month will be reported later), so think of this less as a proof and more as a demonstration.

Here’s what I read:

Continue reading “Stories of consensual crime enforcement”

Who is Maggie McNeill and what is she doing here?

My name is Maggie McNeill, and I’m a whore.

Well, more specifically, a retired whore. Or if you want me to be really specific, a retired call girl and madam who now writes a blog called The Honest Courtesan, in which I discuss the realities of harlotry. Sometimes I write about my personal experiences (sans lurid detail), sometimes about the history of the profession, sometimes about unusual aspects of it most outsiders don’t know about. Once a month I do a biography of a famous prostitute, and once a month I write a fictional tale in which a professional plays some major part, and sometimes I even do funny or whimsical columns. But the great majority of my posts are about the rights of sex workers, which are under heavier assault in the United States (and a number of other countries) than they have been in years. A lot of people enjoy flattering me by telling me that I write very well, and sometimes they do more than just tell me; a few days ago Mark emailed me and asked me to do a few guest blogs here on the issue of sex worker rights, and since I’m kind of easy that way I agreed. For the next few weeks I’ll be doing a weekly post on some important aspect of the issue, then after that I’ll pop in occasionally to weigh in on some story I think is important, or upon which the guys have asked me to comment. They haven’t required me to submit my posts for moderation before they go live (Heeheeheeheehee! The fools!) so if you have an issue with something I write, you can blame nobody but me.

Now, even though most of you think of prostitution as a libertarian issue for the straightforward reason that the government has no business regulating what two or more consenting adults do in private, many of you may not realize that it’s actually much bigger than that. Because prostitution is the only “crime” defined purely by motive (having sex with strangers is perfectly legal unless motivated by financial gain), in the absence of a videotape of the interaction it’s all he said-she said territory. And because professional escorts never, EVER directly agree to the such-and-such sex act for such-and-such amount of money by which prostitution is defined, cops are forced to either A) lie and say they did, or B) come up with some sort of “evidence” of intent to commit prostitution. In the past year in the United States, different districts have claimed all of the following as evidence: the possession of condoms or a cell phone, the lack of underwear, winking, dressing provocatively, loitering in an area known for prostitution, and many others. And Utah recently passed a law which defines “acting sexy” as evidence of prostitution, though the Utah legislature assures us it will only be used against “real” prostitutes.

This sort of “evidence” belongs in a 17^th-century witch trial, not a modern courtroom, yet women (both prostitutes and non-prostitutes) are arrested on such flimsy pretexts every day in this country, and mainstream “feminists” say nothing because they accept the arrest and harassment of individual women as collateral damage in their jihad against prostitution. Nor are women the only ones who need to worry; in Sweden, radical feminists have succeeded in establishing a law which makes it legal to sell sex, but criminal to buy it. Let that sink in for a moment: it’s as though cops witnessing a drug deal were to haul off the junkie and just wave the dealer on his way. The rationale (such as it is) behind this madness is that prostitution is a form of “violence against women”, essentially “paid rape”, so the client is treated as a type of lower-degree rapist. The woman’s wishes are irrelevant; she is considered legally incompetent to consent to sex if there is compensation involved, just as a twelve-year-old girl is incompetent to consent.

This “Swedish Model” has also infiltrated Norway and Iceland (where strip clubs were also banned on the same grounds) and is now being considered in Ireland, France and Israel; radical feminists are agitating for it to be adopted in Canada and the United States as well, and it has already entered into the rhetoric of police departments in Texas, Colorado and Maryland. Georgia recently passed a law allowing the state to seize the assets of anyone accused of “sex trafficking”, and defined the charge so loosely that it can be applied to any male companion of a woman accused of prostitution. And given how easy it is to accuse a woman of prostitution…you get the picture. In the sex worker rights movement we have a slogan: “Sex worker rights are human rights”. Just as the “War on Drugs” has resulted in widespread havoc, tremendous waste and wholesale abridgement of civil rights, so has the “War on Whores” (though to a lesser degree). When the government is allowed to criminalize raw motives, thoughts and relationships, and when a woman can be arrested for how she acts or a man for whom he knows, no one is safe.

Nobody’s Business, now available in blue

I just switched Nobody’s Business over to version 1.1 of our theme. Basically, we were getting a bit tired of the traditional orange, and trying to find other colors that go with it was straining my limited design skills. So Rogier asked the artist who creates our banners — Len Peralta — to redo them in blue. I then used the banners to clip out new background images for the headers in the sidebars. I also made the comments stand out a little more on each post, and cleaned up a few things here and there.

So what do you think?

To me, the site now looks a bit too whimsical. I think the design should be a little more staid, with the cartoons providing a whimsical counterpoint. Maybe I should change the sidebar headers to something more plain. Also, the titles for the posts look too big for the rest of the page. And I think I could probably get away with making the main text slightly smaller.

We’ve been kicking around a few more substantial design changes. I’d like to get rid of the block banner image and replace it with more of a header area, filled with information and links. We’re also thinking of abanding the traditional blog format for more of a news magazine look, which would allow us to show excerpts of the latest stories above the fold (so to speak).

A brief and unnecessary defense of Radley Balko

I want to be Radley Balko when I grow up, so it pains me when I check out how he’s doing at his new job with the Huffington Post and see partisan lunacy like this:

Huffington Post needs to spend some time checking out who writes for them and what their motivations are. Balko used to write for Reason magazine, published by The Reason Foundation, which is a front for Koch brother propaganda. Corporate shills have no place in our media and neither do Cato trained libertarian activists. You can do better HuffPo.

First of all, do you seriously think that the millionaire industrialist Koch brothers are carrying out a Lex-Luthor-style plan to take over state crime labs by infiltrating a libertarian investigative reporter into the Huffington Post? Are you really that nuts?

Second, Cory Maye is a black man who was sentenced to death for shooting and killing a white police officer who had broken into Maye’s home while serving a search warrant for a drug operation that Maye’s neighbors were involved in, despite Maye’s credible claim that he didn’t know the intruder was a cop.

Radley Balko began drawing attention to the case in 2005, and within a year, Cory Maye was off death row, and a new trial is scheduled for later this year. Of course, it was Maye’s volunteer lawyers who did the heavy lifting, but everybody involved credits Radley for drawing attention to Maye’s plight. I sincerely doubt the commenter I quoted above has done anything nearly as cool for the powerless as Radley did for Cory Maye.

Third, Radley has helped expose the terrible practices of the Mississippi medical examiner (and the prosecutors who used these practices to get convictions), and he wrote the book on the problem of increasing police militarization.

Fourth, let me just point out that it’s not the corporate fatcats who suffer from abusive search warrants, police militarization, biased lab work, and all the other questionable behavior Radley has brought to our attention. It’s blacks and Hispanics. It’s poor people in general. It’s anybody who lacks political power. There was a time when liberals and progressives believed in fighting the establishment and helping the powerless, rather than protecting the jobs of the government hacks who were screwing them over.

Fifth, I’m 99% sure that Radley has never met either of the Koch brothers. Heck, until partisan lefties began bashing the Koch brothers — partially in response, no doubt, to the right-wing partisan idiots who were trying to paint progressives as tools of George Soros — most of us libertarians had never even heard of the Koch brothers.

Sixth, in his heart, Radley Balko is practically a liberal himself. He finds himself in agreement with the ACLU far more often than with Ayn Rand. Week after week, he blogs about all the issues of social justice that have concerned American liberals for decades: Free speech, police brutality, institutional racism, and the moral scolds who try to tell us all what to do. What makes Radley a libertarian is that he’s willing to consider market solutions to some of these problems.

Get a grip, HuffPo readers. You have nothing to fear from Radley Balko.

A judge’s bias

Today’s Fresno Bee — I still read the paper edition, but you can find a similar story here — reports that a federal judge, Judge James Ware, refused to invalidate his predecessor Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s ruling on gay marriage on the basis that Walker himself is gay and thus in some way tainted.

Opponents of gay marriage are said to be planning an appeal. I wonder if one of their arguments will be that Judge Ware should have recused himself from ruling on whether Judge Walker should have recused himself.

An argument — equally as ridiculous as the one already used against Judge Walker’s ruling — could be made: Judge Ware and Judge Walker are both judges and both have somewhat similar last names that start with “W” and so Judge Ware might have been biased in favor of anything Judge Walker had to say.

Come to think of it, that’s not actually all that far-fetched.

The original argument of California’s homophobic Proposition 8 supporters is the one I’d prefer to focus on here and, since I’m not a judge — and have seldom been a defender of judges — and my name is unlike any of those guys, I’m going to claim no bias on that basis.

On the other hand, I think I’m a libertarian: I am biased against the busybodies who believe there should be laws against people exercising their natural right to live their lives according to their own wishes, unrestrained by the wishes of others.

The not-yet-fully-understood truth of the matter is that bias is a part of being human. It comes in all forms. It’s unavoidable. Any pretense otherwise is just that: pretense.

Consider the irony that this whole case is about bias: bias against the life-choices of a particular group of people — people who may, or may not, really be “choosing,” as that term is traditionally understood, at all.

Getting back to the “bias comes in all forms” statement, the Fresno Bee story says the homophobic group said:

Walker should have disclosed his now 10-year-old relationship with his partner so he could have been asked about his interest in marrying the man.

Should a heterosexual judge have to reveal his heterosexuality so that he could be asked about his possible lack of desire to marry a man, or maybe even about his feelings or his beliefs about such a marriage for others? If the fact of being gay leads to a need for deeper probing, does not the fact of not being gay have the same need? If not, why not?

And why stop there? Republicans like to claim that they are “tough on crime” and unsympathetic towards what Democrats might consider potential defenses — or at least mitigating circumstances — regarding crime. Justice Thomas would seem to be a walking, talking, extreme proof of that. Should judges in criminal cases have to reveal their political party and be subjected to more intensive questioning towards a potential recusal motion based upon their answer?

Is it an accident that under so-called “liberal courts,” our constitutional rights were protected, while under so-called “conservative courts,” they’ve become essentially non-existent? Does the meaning of the Constitution change according to the bias of the court? Or is it just the bias of the court that changes? I don’t think you even have to be an honest person to know the answer to that.

Maybe to admit it; not to know it.

Frankly, there seems to be no denying that such biases affect what rights the courts determine us to have, or not have. Bias impacts not just a court’s decision whether we do or don’t have certain rights, but also whether government has gone too far outside its constitutional bounds, or that it hasn’t, in regulating the exercise of such rights. This liberal/conservative “split” is something we argue about more than virtually anything else in this country — particularly when it comes to government, including our courts. Our greatest efforts are expended to ensure that those who we believe will endorse our views — liberal for liberals; conservative for conservatives — are elected and appointed.

Equally frankly, I can think of no more logical reason why libertarianism should be the controlling paradigm for humanity — particularly for a nation such as ours, whose foundational move was to fight a war to be free from governmental control, and then attempt to enshrine libertarian values in a Constitution. The Founders — who were no doubt biased — clearly intended to create as free a nation as possible. Their key motivation was the idea that every individual (at least, every individual like them) was entitled to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To secure this, they said, is why government exists.

Government is necessary — and I do not mean “a necessary evil,” but truly necessary — to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to each individual. Only a government can prevent individuals from interfering with the lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness for other individuals without (usually) significant bloodshed.

Given that bias is inherent in being a live person — as opposed, possibly, to some other type of creature and as opposed, definitely, to being a dead person — we should recognize this weakness and adopt a more libertarian approach to the lives of others. We should endorse libertarianism as a modus operandi for our government. Libertarianism makes sense because the idea that a world where what kind of life we can choose, how much liberty we have, and which happiness is okay and which is proscribed is dependent upon the bias of our rulers is illogical.

At least, it’s illogical if, as our Founders said, all of us are created equal and the aforementioned rights are unalienable.

Gone, but not forgotten

I run this old editorial of mine every year on the anniversary of Peter McWilliams’ death, as a reminder of the folly that is the drug war. Also, to commemorate a funny, decent, hardworking man who was hounded to death by a government that would rather see patients die than grant them the relief of medical marijuana.

McWilliams, by the way, unwittingly gave this blog its name, thanks to his eye-opening pro-liberty screed Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do. The book is for sale here. It’s been eleven years since McWilliams met his death at the hands of drug warriors.

The Ad That Killed Its Maker

by Rogier van Bakel

When Peter McWilliams took out an ad, it killed him. Literally.

The ad, an open letter to the movie community, ran in Daily Variety in December 1997. “Where is Hollywood’s answer … to the ten million marijuana arrests since 1972?” Peter asked. “Where is the Gentleman’s Agreement or To Kill a Mockingbird or Platoon dramatizing the insane cruelty of the War on Drugs?” He also blasted Drug Enforcement Administration officials as “arrogant” and “selfrighteous.”

It wasn’t unfamiliar territory for Peter. In 1993, he’d published an unputdownable, thought-provoking tome called Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do — the Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country (updated in 1996, and available for free here, in electronic form). The book, which made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, documented U.S. politicians’ attempts to legislate what people may and may not see, read, and ingest. Peter launched a particularly formidable argument against drug prohibition.

In 1996, when AIDS and cancer entered his life, he became an advocate for medical marijuana, testifying before the National Academy of Sciences and giving numerous media interviews. “As a recent cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation survivor who uses medicinal marijuana to keep down the anti-AIDS drugs that are keeping me alive,” Peter wrote in the Variety ad, “I can personally attest to marijuana’s anti-nausea effect.”

Exactly seventeen days after the ad ran, the government responded the only way it knows how: with a full-scale raid. Eight DEA agents, guns drawn, stormed Peter’s house in Laurel Canyon, California, and confiscated his computer, his backup drives, and various research materials. Peter readily admitted to growing some marijuana for his own medical use, “in the time-honored tradition of Washington, Jefferson, and Timothy Leary.”

The feds had no arrest warrant at the time of the raid, but they finally came for him in July of 1998. The indictment against Peter made much of the fact that as the publisher of Prelude Press, his own publishing company where he employed eighteen people, Peter had given an advance to an author for a book on medical marijuana. That writer, a fellow medical-marijuana patient, used a portion of the money to grow his own medicine. The feds saw Prelude Press as the source of the funds the man had used to finance his little crop. So they treated Peter like a drug kingpin.

It’s an interesting piece of logic. If a Microsoft engineer uses some of his salary to visit a prostitute, should Bill Gates be arrested on federal pandering charges?

More importantly, did Peter really break the law? Depends on whom you ask. California explicitly allows the use of medical marijuana under Proposition 215, which voters passed into California constitutional law in 1996. The federal government, however, does not recognize a state’s right to adopt its own drug legislation. So what Peter did was perfectly legal in his own state; it just didn’t sit well with some drugfighting hard-liners three thousand miles away in Washington D.C., who decided to dispatch an assault team to an increasingly frail AIDS and cancer patient.

One of the conditions of Peter’s bail was a weekly urine test. Were he to test positive for illicit drugs, he’d return to jail, pending his trial. Besides, his mother (in her seventies) had put up her house as collateral for the bond. The feds could seize her home and evict her if Peter violated his bail terms. So Peter was forced to be sick as a dog on most days — much sicker than he would have been if he’d been allowed to smoke marijuana, a plant whose medical benefits are well-documented. Now frequently unable to hold down down his medication, Peter grew weaker and became wheelchair-bound.

Last month, when he was at home, taking a bath, the nausea overcame him once more. He choked to death on his own vomit. He was 50 years old. He died because the government wouldn’t let him have a toke. Viewed another way, he died because he had the temerity to run that ad.

The prosecutors commented they were “saddened” by Peter’s death.

No doubt, so are the smart, well-meaning creatives on Madison Avenue who make ad campaigns for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, propagating a War on Drugs that is making more casualties by the day.

Peter McWilliams

This blog is named after Peter McWilliams’ amazing book, Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country. The premise of the book is simple:

This book is about a single idea—consenting adults should not be put in jail unless they physically harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other.

Peter called laws that violate this principle consensual crimes. He preferred that term to the more common phrase “victimless crime,” which he felt had been given too many meanings — everything from people claiming that it’s a victimless crime to steal from big corporations, to lawyers pointing out that some crimes technically have no victims, to moral scolds eager to proclaim us all victims — whereas “consensual crimes” focuses on the key issue, which is the consent of all involved.

Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do went on to elaborate on this idea for hundreds of pages. We could probably quibble with some of the details, but his main point was completely correct: Consensual crimes should not be crimes at all.

In 1996, Peter McWilliams was diagnosed with AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The medicine he used to treat these diseases made him extremely nauseated, a condition he was able to calm by smoking marijuana. During this time he became an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana. Possibly as a response to that advocacy, the DEA arrested McWilliams and charged him with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Having been forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition to a jury, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency.

And then, eleven years ago today, while out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother’s house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

A memorial site for Peter McWilliams includes his essay “Joy is Good”:

In March 1996, I opened the door to death and stared the Grim Reaper in the face. There was a pause. Then he suddenly smiled and said, “Enjoy yourself! It’s later than you think.”

William F. Buckley eulogized Peter McWilliams as “a wry, mythogenic guy, humorous, affectionate, articulate, shrewd, sassy.”

It’s hard to imagine a more ironic death for such a generous spirit, a man who wanted so much for people to be free. It all sounds like some bad made-for-TV movie. Some part of me thinks that Peter would probably appreciate the irony.

I’m not as generous a spirit as Peter was. This post is a reminder that Peter was essentially murdered by a bunch of drug warriors, and that the kinds of people who did that to him should not be forgotten. Nor forgiven.

Tennessee criminalizes the Internet — with pics!

The Tennessee legislature just passed a law saying that posting images online can be a crime if they “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress.” The distress doesn’t have to be intended, or targeted at a particular person. The rule is so broadly written that anyone who sees a web image that is in any way distressing is now potentially a victim.

The one thing I find more frightening and distressing than offensive photos I run across online is that I live in a country where legislators have no compunction about wasting their time, and ours, secreting a law that any ten-year-old can recognize as an unconstitutional turd.

Anyway, here are some images that distress me. Or maybe I’m fine with ’em, I don’t know; maybe I’m just distressed by the distress they could cause to others.

Which one(s) should be a crime, do you reckon?

Hey, I have an idea: Why don’t the assclowns in the Tennessee state house put on their big-girl panties and decide that someone who’s offended by any of these images isn’t worthy of one scintilla of legal protection? Especially being that we have a First Amendment an’ all?

And if the image of lawmakers in panties offends you, and you happen to live in Tennessee, congratulations — you know what to do.

[© Crain Communications and Rogier van Bakel, 2000. Originally published in Advertising Age’s Creativity.]