Posted on 09/30/2005 4:08:48 PM PDT by dukeman
HOBART, - According to an apparently unembarrassed official of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Australian state of Tasmania, guidelines have been established that allow care givers to organise visits for disabled clients to Hobart’s local brothels.
The terms “hooker or “street walker” have long been taboo as being insensitive. Now “prostitute,” is no longer acceptable either and the properly affirming phrase “sex trade worker,” is used to describe the world’s oldest profession. This new nomenclature is especially important now that publicly funded social workers can – and do – arrange for their intellectually disabled charges to make visits to the ladies in order to exercise their sexual “rights.”
Disability Services state manager Michael Plaister said to The Mercury newspaper, “What we've got is a longstanding policy based around the principles of human rights that people with disabilities have the same rights as anyone else in the community and are entitled to be assisted to exercise those rights.”
Disability Services' guidelines include a section developed in 2001, titled “Access to a Sex Worker.” It states, “Sex workers should be seen as one of a number of options to consider when supporting people with disabilities to make decisions about their sexual needs.” The report in The Mercury says that though the men usually pay for the services themselves, guidelines exist for social service funds to be made available should they be strapped for cash.
A spokesman for Advocacy Tasmania, a non-profit organisation that provides legal services to elderly and disabled people, said that people with disabilities had a right to express their sexuality and to have a sex life.
The “right” to fornication has its own internal logic and social workers in Denmark as well as Australia have followed it industriously to its conclusion in the care of disabled clients.
In Denmark, the government has arranged a more regimented system in which the social services pays for “sex workers” to service disabled men twice a month. The Danish guidelines state, “It could be of great importance that the carer speaks to the prostitute together with the person in their care, to help them express their wishes.”
The contradiction between governments fighting the exploitation and trafficking of women and paying for those women to service men under public care has not escaped everyone. Danish Social-Democrat spokesman Kristen Brosboel said: “We spend a large proportion of our taxes rescuing women from prostitution. But at the same time we officially encourage carers to help contact with prostitutes.”
As in Australia, however, official arguments in Denmark against the practice will clash with the obvious problem that prostitution is not illegal in either country. As is common in many “enlightened” western nations, only living off the profits of prostitution is illegal, not the practice itself.
The problem rests upon a contradictory notion that there is such a thing as a “right” to sexual relations outside marriage. This idea, that will appear bizarre to many, is now common in governments and civil service circles around the world and is harmfully effecting a wide range of legislation.
In Canada, the growing acceptance of prostitution by government is only a small part of a general coarsening of social interaction. This week, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler used the idea of a “right” to fornication as the argument to defeat a bill to raise the age of sexual consent by children from 14 – one of the lowest in the world – to 16.
What part of this is series?
So it's OK to have sex with someone for money, but it's bad if you use the money you get to buy stuff you need, like food or an apartment? OK, makes sense to me.
It may surprise FReepers, but the USA is one of those many "enlightened" western nations. There can be no fed law prohibiting prostitution, and even States are only empowered to 'reasonably regulate' the practice, using their police powers under the 10th amendment.
Not series but hugh!
What they mean is, it's not okay to be a pimp (living off the proceeds), but it is okay for the prostitute to keep and use her own money.
Well, it does give a whole new meaning to "cradle to grave"...
They've phrased it badly there, but the gist of it is an anti-pimping law. It's okay to make money off prostituting yourself, but not others.
That's a surprising statement. Upon what do you base it? If that's true, why is prostitution illegal in the majority of municipalities? Is it just another case of criminalizing something over which they actually have no legal authority and hoping nobody notices?
Could you put a Barf alert on your title.
Got it. Thanks for the clarification.
Whatever happened to that German court case where an unemployed woman was scheduled to have her benefits stopped if she turned down a prostitute job with a brothel that posted an opening at the local unemployment office?
I thought your signup date was in 1998. My beeber is stuned.
Anti-Liberal Sarcasm Torpedo ARMED. FIRE!!
In other news, Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Gov. Blanco of Louisiana have asked for $25 billion in federal funds to purchase debit cards allowing victims of Hurricane Katrina to participate in this initiative, under the so-called Overseas Vouchers for Emergency Relief of SEXual Excitement in Disasters (OVERSEXED) pilot program.
If the program is successful, similar funding will be sought for those subject to Typhoon LONGWANG in the Pacific Rim.
Cheers!
ROFL--this is too funny!
Federal prohibitation of immorality comes in through the Mann act which penalizes dissolute sea mammals ("transportation across state lines for immoral porpoises").
What's more, given that this is a socialist program, they get the whores with seniority.
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