Whorehouse Morality
Voters in Churchill County, Nevada voted on Tueday by a 2 to 1 margin to keep brothels legal; and they also voted by a 3 to 1 margin to keep George W. Bush as President - of the Country, not of the brothels. By the way, Clark County (Las Vegas), one of only two Counties where prostitution is illegal, voted for Kerry by 52 to 47.
posted by Tom Blake | 8:32 AM
2 Comments:
I wonder if the exit polls there showed moral values as the leading issue of the Bush supporters.
John
Hello Teresa and Hi again John. As both of your comments show, beneath the seemingly incongruous humor of the Churchill County vote, there are some serious issues. Drinking, gambling and sex have traditionally been considered vices by many people, yet many States depend on alcohol and gambling revenue as a significant contributor to their budgets. In spite all the talk of “values”, the pendulum in most of this country is still swinging in the direction of alcohol and gambling. Why is prostitution different from the other two?
I don’t think the sexual aspect is what causes prostitution to be viewed differently. Granted we talk a prudish game in this country, but we actually do very little to back it up. Sex is used blatantly to market alcohol and is used in less blatant ways to market gambling, and there really is no great public outcry - Janet Jackson’s breast I think was just being used to try to market Janet Jackson. But the unique sexual aspect of prostitution is the fixed gender roles - women are the sellers (with some men participating as brokers) and men are the buyers, and men have always had a hard time [no pun intended] accepting that.
As for the exit polls on values in Churchill County, I don’t have the answer, except I think the question is the answer. Values are so general and at the same time so personal, that each person’s values are unique to that person, and for many of us, our values do actually change with experience and according to the circumstances of a particular time. The exit pollsters would have served us better if they had not used a generic term like values, but instead polled on the current hot button issues such as gay marriage and abortion - and in Churchill County, whorehouses.
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