Introduced by Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener, Bill 357 was signed into law by fellow “progressive” Gavin Newsom last July and took effect in California on Jan. 1, this year. Heralded as the “Safer Streets for All Act,” it prohibits police from arresting women suspected of being prostitutes simply because they are dressed scantily and appear to be loitering in the pursuit of customers. Wiener insisted that the discretionary powers formerly available to police had resulted in the arrest of an inordinate number of colored women as well as an unjustified level of violence towards sex workers in general. Clearly cops who unnecessarily resort to violence need to be disciplined if not fired. At the same time, was the racial imbalance in the numbers of those arrested a matter of police profiling or the inevitable result of the impoverished seeking to escape their condition of poverty by whatever means necessary? Obviously I cannot answer such questions. But I can report on the very predictable result of this typically naive piece of Leftist legislation.
Parents of kids attending St. Anthony’s elementary school in East Oakland, Cal., have been complaining over the last few weeks of scantily clad women wearing spiked heels who clearly seem to be prostitutes loitering in the neighborhood of that school. Videos taken on 4 separate occasions show young children walking side by side with them while no doubt unaware of what they were up to. City Councilman Noel Gallo says he has received similar complaints from other residential neighborhoods. Oakland city police, however, say there is little they can do given the restrictions placed on them by Bill 357.
I must admit the illegality of prostitution to be a contentious issue for me given that it involves an agreement between two adults that entails no conspicuous harm to either. At the same time, of course, it is an abomination to Feminists, Christians and indeed all genuine Humanists for whom it represents a desecration of what ought to be the ultimate expression of love between a man and a woman. As Western tradition has maintained from the days of the Ancient Greeks that we are more than just animals, it makes sense that prostitution continues to be illegal in our Western Democracies. But as I have suggested in various blogs, all our traditional beliefs are now under attack from the Left which characterizes them as mere expressions of White Supremacy. At the heart of this assault is the Marxist notion of materialistic determinism which assumes we do not have Free Will but are merely the products of our environment. Hence the “liberal” tendency to view prostitutes, and particularly those of color, as the innocent victims of poverty. Hence the absurdity of California where they are allowed to roam the streets utterly untouched by the police.
A similar relaxation of the laws governing the sale and purchase of drugs has rendered many California cities crime infested parodies of what they once were. Statistics show that thousands are fleeing the state each and every month, generally for the safer confines of Republican ruled states where the Rule of Law remains a major priority. Quite aside from the seeming superficiality of the Ideas informing the political Left, the third world lawlessness induced by the application of those ideas leaves little doubt as to their merit!