Why it's bad when "choice" is the Left's only choice left.

While I hate to reinforce the idea that all women's issues are coitus-related, the issues of pornography, abortion, and prostitution keep blurring together in the universe of Yale's political dialogue, and to generally good effect. Here's David of the Flaming Libs in response to this YDN editorial on why feminists should respect the "choice" of prostitution as much as the "choice" of abortion:

[T]he real threat the article poses . . . isn't that it legitimates pornography (which is debatable within feminist thought, though I probably come down on the anti side) but that it appropriates the language by which we defend abortion rights to make anything a woman does with her body (or even anything she does that is tied to her womanhood at all, as in the case of Ms. Spitzer) fall under the same framework of "choice."

He continues:

It's easy for me to deny (and most Libs are probably on board with me here) the author's implied libertarian argument that anything we do without a gun to our heads constitutes free choice, made clear by the comparison to fast food workers. There are gradations of freedom, and both the fast food worker and the prostitute lack it to some extent. We want to ban prostitution but not fast food work because the problems with fast food work (mostly low wages and lack of benefits) could be alleviated through robust living wage laws, provision of universal health care, etc, while those associated with prostitution (selling control of your own body to someone else) are inherent to the profession and thus can't be eliminated.

But, as David realizes, the decision to have an abortion is also related to economic need, which leaves him here:

I believe a woman who economic circumstances force to have an abortion should be able to have that abortion, but that a woman whose economic circumstances force her to engage in porn or prostitution shouldn't be allowed to do so. Perhaps the difference is that porn/prostitution involve selling control of one's body to another person and that I reject the notion that such a contract could be legitimate. But does that make me the mere moralizer that the author of the article attacks? Does anyone have a better answer?

James Poulos might have had, in the context of Spitzer:

...the reason why prostitution is illegal must not be because 'the state' has some kind of 'compelling interest' in people not . . . not what? We can't characterize the interest as compelling—and then describe what compelling even really means—until we plunk prostitution into some more abstract category that accounts for why it's bad. This is the ultra-absurd version of what ought to be the real discussion, which begins from the notion that prostitution in and of itself is bad, that in describing prostitution we automatically describe why it's bad, and therefore don't need any vaguer and broader and more comprehensive set of badness terms against which we can put prostitution and say — aha! there, you see, prostitution threatens liberal values, 'the state' of the sort which we have can't 'be seen to support' such behavior, or 'has an affirmative interest in disincentivizing' such behavior, etc., etc.

"Prostitution should be illegal because it is bad, and bad things should be illegal" — this is the logic of a culture with the confidence to take its own side in an argument.

...since significant numbers of smart people who talk publicly about these things in the media no longer really feel any collective shame when someone turns out to have broken some law for no reason more dire than their enjoyment of sexual pleasure, we can't simply turn the page, step on Spitzer, and move on to the next headline. We have to go through this whole OMG how do we Justify Banning Prostitution?!?! routine, inevitably wracking ourselves with however much [small-l] liberal guilt seems appropriate to reestablish the contradictory standards for public and private life that make liberal democracy such a successful political arrangement. When really the only possible justification for punishing prostitution is because the leaders of authority in a culture, if not large numbers of common people, think that paying for sex is beneath them. Yes, contempt is the cold heart of the law—at least once you get past the legal status of murder. An inconvenient truth when one's culture struggles so hard to convince one that you must not have contempt for anybody.

There are things government ought and ought not to do, but I'm wary of any system of differentiating between the two that depends upon (1) subdividing Moral Badness into smaller categories — i.e. within the state's compelling interest (given the ends the state should have, which are...?) or not, in violation of someone else's rights or not, etc., (2) picking one of those categories as legitimate grounds for government action, and then (3) trying to forget that moral badness was ever part of the equation. There are certainly things the government could do For The Sake Of Most Worthy Virtue that would be bad ideas, but they're bad ideas on the grounds that they wouldn't actually get us any closer to the virtue they're aiming at, not that they're pursuing some species of virtue that is less relevant or less important.

So, is David one of the moralizers of which Molly Green complains? Yes. Should that bother him? Not really. (Does that put him on the Right? I dunno — my guess is no, but you'd have to ask Dara.)