On Jan 30, 2005, at 2:20 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
Link forwarded to me from another list:
<<http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42615>>
Quote:
"Now that prostitution is no longer considered by the law to be immoral, there is really nothing but the goodwill of the job centers to stop them from pushing women into jobs they don't want to do."
Interesting, but I don't expect the situation to last. There are, I imagine, enough people in Germany (a civilized nation) to protest the kinds of actions the article alleges.
You wouldn't know it from the "news" source, however. WorldNetDaily is pretty obviously slanted right-wing; furthermore it seems they were *paraphrasing* an article from a UK source:
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/30/ wgerm30.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/01/30/ixworld.html>
There's a kind of backtrail as well; this appeared in 2004:
<http://www.taz.de/pt/2004/12/18/a0077.nf/text>
*very* rough translation here:
<http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent? url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taz.de%2Fpt%2F2004%2F12%2F18%2Fa0077.nf%2Ftext&lp=d e_en>
There are some legitimate causes for concern on many sides. Since prostitution is legal in Germany, brothel owners pay the equivalent of Social Security, unemployment insurance and payroll tax -- their reasoning is that they are entitled legally to look for employees from the same sources as any other industry, specifically job centers.
Of course you get problems like this as well, which is unfortunate; but if you find washing dishes to be beneath you and refuse work in that area, you can get exactly the same benefit cut as this unfortunate woman faces.
Other people face similar challenges -- as the Tageszeitung article points out, if you're Muslim, you might want to refuse work in a butcher shop that handles hog meat. But again, you face benefit cuts if you do.
Obviously there are some problems that need to be worked out of the system; but prostitution's only been legal in Germany since 2002, so you sort of have to expect these problems to surface for the time being. As Donald Rumsfeld pointed out, freedom is messy.
And for the record, declaring that something is legal or illegal does *not* legislate morality.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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