On that Supreme Court of Canada decision

I would have posted this earlier but with the ice storm in Toronto, power became a complicated thing. As a side note, we think we are very advanced in our culture with instant communication of all kinds, however, when hydro goes down, all of us are returned to the late 1800s. The great equalizer. I digress.

I wrote this up the day the Supreme Court of Canada decided our prostitution laws are unconstitutional. It’s a bit of a different kind of article to write for me, less academic than usual. Feel free to add reasonable comments, as I note it already has the usual well-informed ones lining up.

So often those of us who are against the legalization of prostitution are portrayed as prudish. Scared of sex. Moralistic.

We think more highly of ourselves than the rest of those other folks who are dirty and disgusting, be it johns or the women who prostitute themselves. So the storyline goes.

But the legalization of prostitution is not wrong because it is an “us versus them” battle. It is wrong because the legalization of prostitution will affect every household, every family and every person in similar ways. This is because human nature is the same. We face the same temptations in our hearts.

The only difference between me and a woman who prostitutes herself is that the seeds that would have launched me onto a path of prostitution were not watered. In short, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” as the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote.

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