by Laurie Higgins via American Greatness,
As if America needed any more proof that Democrat-ruled Illinois is the worst state in the union, that Democrats don’t care about the suffering of women and children, and that Democrats have no interest in the common good, Illinois Democrats have announced that they will be proposing legislation to “decriminalize sex work.” In other words, they plan on moving step by step toward legalizing prostitution. If successful, Illinois would have the dubious honor of being the first state to decriminalize prostitution.
The instigators of this offense against women are Chicago Democrat State Representative Will Guzzardi—a product of an Ivy League education—and State Senator Celina Villanueva. They are collaborating with crossdressing man and former prostitute “Reyna” Ortiz and homosexual Brian C. Johnson, another Ivy grad and CEO of Illinois’ infamous LGBTQ+ activist organization, Equality Illinois.
The first step by leftists in their eternal quest to make America unlivable is always to redefine terms, hence the Newspeakian term “sex work,” with its positive connotations of labor and industry. Illinois Democrats hope to destigmatize the degrading purchase of women’s bodies for the hedonistic pleasure of men by associating such evil with other forms of work.
Cited in a WTTW report on the impending bill, Brian Johnson said that reducing the crime of prostitution to a misdemeanor in 2013 “has contributed to a 97% reduction in arrests and prosecutions of sex-related offenses.” Is that a justification for decriminalizing prostitution? If so, why not legalize theft? Legalizing theft would likely reduce arrests and prosecutions of theft-related offenses by 100%.
Jeanne Ives posted on X another reason Illinois Dems want to legalize the institutional sexual abuse of women:
Illinois Dems looking for tax $$.
Casinos
Video Gambling
Sports Betting
Liquor
Cannabis
And now legalizing prostitution.
There is nothing IL Democrats won’t do to suck money out of the pockets of decent, hardworking Americans. Predators prey on the worst impulses of humans and do so without regard for the human suffering they cause.
Ortiz admits to “living under the fear and threat of violence” during his twenty-year stint as a crossdressing male prostitute. He assumes such fear and threats will be reduced by decriminalizing prostitution, but that’s not what Janice G. Raymond argues in an article published in both the Journal of Trauma Practice and in Prostitution, Trafficking and Traumatic Stress.
Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, feminist, and lesbian Raymond looked at the question of “What happens when prostitution is treated as ‘sex work’ rather than … as sexual exploitation and violence against women,” and finds many reasons to oppose “all state-sponsored forms of prostitution,”
including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution, or any system in which prostitution is recognized as “sex work” or advocated as an employment choice.
Those reasons include the following:
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps, traffickers and the sex industry. … Some people believe that, in calling for legalization or decriminalization of prostitution, they dignify and professionalize the women in prostitution. But dignifying prostitution as work doesn’t dignify the women, it simply dignifies the sex industry. They haven’t thought through the consequences of legalizing pimps as legitimate sex entrepreneurs or third party businessmen, or the fact that men who buy women for sexual activity are now accepted as legitimate consumers of sex.”
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex industry promotes sex trafficking. … One argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that legalization would help to end the exploitation of desperate immigrant women who had been trafficked there for prostitution. However, one report found that 80% of women in the brothels of the Netherlands were trafficked from other countries.
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control the sex industry. It expands it.”
“Legalization/decriminalizaton of prostitution increases clandestine, illegal and street prostitution. … many women are in street prostitution because they want to avoid being controlled and exploited by pimps (transformed in legalized systems into sex businessmen). Other women do not want to register or submit to health checks, as required by law in some countries where prostitution is legalized. Thus, legalization may actually drive some women into street prostitution.”
“Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution. … The Amsterdam-based ChildRight organization estimates that the number of children in prostitution … increased by more than 300% between 1996 –2001, going from 4,000 children in 1996 to 15,000 in 2001. ChildRight estimates that at least 5,000 of … children in Dutch prostitution are trafficked from other countries.”
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect the women in prostitution.”
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the demand for prostitution. It encourages men to buy women for sex in a wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable settings. … many men who previously would not have risked buying women for sex now see prostitution as acceptable.”
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote women’s health.”
“Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women’s choice. … There is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be in prostitution, especially in public contexts orchestrated by the sex industry. In the same way, some people choose to take dangerous drugs such as amphetamine. However, even when some people consent to use dangerous drugs, we still recognize that is harmful to them, and most people do not seek to legalize amphetamine. In this situation, it is harm to the person, not the consent of the person, that is the governing standard.”
In 2019, Democrats in Congress tried to pass a similar bill. Every Illinois lawmaker considering supporting Villanueva’s and Guzzardi’s repugnant bill should read the testimony of Ally-Marie Diamond, a victim of the decriminalized prostitution system in New Zealand, who pleaded with Congress to reject the bill:
Throughout my time in prostitution, many men threw me across the room, slapped me, called me “a useless black bitch,” brutally sodomised me, told me I was worthless and should be grateful they were giving me money. Sex buyers would try sticking their entire fists into my vagina, degrade me, beat me, rape me. When I could finally catch my breath, my body hurt terribly. I was bruised, broken, my nipples were cracked and bleeding. …
When decriminalization advocates say that prostitution would come out into the “light,” all the abuse inherent to the prostitution goes on behind closed doors, the scariest room in any commercial sex establishment. Sex buyers will not see women any differently than as objects, and their attitude to do as they please to the women they purchase – battery, rape, sodomy – does not change. Sex buyers shoved bottles, vegetables, oversized vibrators, shoe heels, batons and whatever else their warped minds could come up with, so far and so hard up my sisters’ vaginas, they damaged their reproductive systems beyond repair. So many of my sisters got lost in those streets, with substance abuse to the point that they died of kidney and liver failure. And for those who couldn’t cope anymore, chose the only path they could see – suicide. …
Since the 2003 Aotearoa New Zealand law, street prostitution has risen by 400%. In fully decriminalized Aotearoa New Zealand, girls as young as 9 are being sold on the streets of Auckland, and 12-year olds are being bought in licensed massage parlours. … Sex tourism flourishes, as does sex trafficking to replenish the brothels and the market of flesh.
Writing about the failed 2019 congressional bill, Lisa Thompson, vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s Research Institute, makes clear the place of coercion in the sex trade industry:
Supporters … fail to see the grotesque power imbalance between the person purchased in sex, and the purchaser. Simply put, the person with the money, is the person with the power. Whether the buyer is Robert Kraft or a blue collar worker, it’s the money that leverages the sexual exchange not an actual desire to have sex. Thus, paid sex is coerced sex.
Many current and former prostitutes who support the decriminalization of prostitution began selling their bodies while minors, as Ortiz did, living lives of quiet desperation and abuse, thereby illuminating the intrinsically coercive nature of the sex trade industry.
Just as marijuana dispensaries have popped up all over Illinois, so too will venues that sell women’s bodies for sex if this bill passes. Let’s hope Illinoisans have the spine to stop this bill before women and children are grievously harmed and before more good people hightail it out of this Godforsaken state.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illinois-poised-become-even-worst
