On Prostitution

I have four daughters, and I would hate to see any of them become prostitutes. The Bible uses the prostitute as a symbol of the worst kind of evil, the turning of God’s people away from him, and warns the godly man that the temptation he will find hardest to resist is the immoral woman. Sexual intimacy is the means by which people fulfill the first commandment God gave them, to be fruitful and multiply. We can therefore expect that if the devil wants to make people miserable, he will lure them into perverse sexual practices, of which prostitution is certainly one. A sexually immoral society pollutes the land it occupies, as the Bible says, and it eventually transmogrifies into a violent society, as we have seen in the US, as the free love generation of the 1960s has come to support an unlimited police and surveillance state at home and unending war overseas. And along with the prostitution culture seem to come the drug culture and the gang warfare culture. So how can one who claims to advocate biblical neighborliness call for prostitutes to be treated like farmers at a farmers’ market?

The first reason is that the Bible nowhere calls for prostitutes to be jailed. When the daughters of priests were sexually immoral, they were to be burned alive; they had violated a ceremonial boundary. But if the women of any of the other eleven tribes became prostitutes, they came under no explicit regulation. Remember, the Torah tells women how to act during their menstruation and men how to deal with nocturnal emissions, so it isn’t as though God is bashful about bringing up the subject. We can safely say that for most women prostitution was not a crime.

If you need a positive example, let’s take the one time God’s appointed political authority confronted a prostitute: Solomon’s arbitration of the dispute between two prostitutes.

He did not treat them as criminals; he treated them as ordinary citizens. And note what the Bible says after describing his actions: “When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice” (1 Kgs 3:16). Solomon later did a lot of things that showed he was a sinner, a failure at fulfilling God’s job definition for a king, but here he seems to have gotten it right: this event is the only event recorded between God’s promise to give Solomon a wise and discerning heart and the narrator’s claim that Solomon had wisdom from God. His treatment of a prostitute as an ordinary citizen showed that he was the wisest man who ever lived. In the face of that, how dare we take that woman’s son away from her, give him to the Child Welfare Service bureaucrats, and put her in jail?

What would it take for my daughters to become prostitutes? While almost anyone can find women who don’t care who sees them naked or involved in what used to be termed private behavior, which makes me think there are hookers who enjoy the work, I can’t imagine what would lead my girls, or anyone I care about, for that matter, into prostitution. I expect that most are like Fantine, reduced to it by misfortune, self-inflicted or otherwise, and the bawdy women (“Lovely Ladies”) who introduce the prostitution theme in Les Mis are laughing to keep from crying.

Does hauling a prostitute off to jail deal with the problem that reduced her to prostitution in the first place? Once she gets out, what does she have? She will leave jail penniless. Who will hire a woman with a criminal record? (“Prostitution, eh? And you want to work here?”) If her family wouldn’t or couldn’t help her avoid prostitution, are they going to aid her now? I would say that jailing prostitutes is the loudest possible testimony that famine and nakedness can indeed separate us from the love of Christ.

Prostitution is not a victimless activity, but neither is watching TV. I can remember seeing men put their arms around women’s waists on Lawrence Welk or other innocuous shows else long before I knew where babies came from, and all I could think was it looked like fun and I couldn’t wait to try it myself. (And then there was the kissing—ohhhhhhhhhh!) After seeing Tonto get bonked on the head with a gun in act 2 of the Lone Ranger every week and seeing him return to help save the day in act 3, I knew exactly what to do when my friend Bob took my place in line during a game of cowboys and Indians. Do we really want to treat television, evil as it is, as a criminal activity?

Or let’s take another non-victimless activity: taverns. Men (mostly) spend their hard-earned money on overpriced alcohol and lose time they can never regain playing pool or flirting with the barflies or just talking about things we wouldn’t want our kids to participate in; they get drunk and go home and abuse their wives and children, who don’t have the material resources they would have otherwise because the money has gone to liquor.

Realizing that, Carrie Nation and her gang of thugs crusaded to close down taverns and eventually succeeded. The taverns were indeed closed down, but the underground liquor trade that replaced it was more profitable than the legal trade had ever been, at least for those at the top of the pile, and those with minimal intelligence could still get alcohol. Because the trade in alcohol was illegal, the only way to protect one’s turf was with a gun, which brought about the organized crime gangs that still plague us today. Tomato sellers at farmers’ markets are in competition, but they don’t kill each other. Why not? Because tomatoes are legal. Marijuana and cocaine dealers do kill each other, as do pimps. Why? Because there is no legal or socially acceptable way for them to protect their lives and property. Stop jailing prostitutes and druggies, allow them the same access to protection the rest of us have, and the incentives for violence disappear.

Again, my guess is that very few women want to go into prostitution; the vast majority would rather be moms, nurses, lawyers, or astronauts. If we really want to stop prostitution, we love these women before they are reduced to selling their bodies. We teach their parents to use money wisely and not to abuse their daughters; we take these womean into our homes when they have nowhere else to go. We help them start their own businesses that cater to what’s best in their neighbors. It’s not an easy road, but the way of the cross never is. Simply throwing prostitutes in jail and dusting off our hands is easy, but it is not biblical, loving, or ultimately in our best interests or that of the gospel. It’s not how we love our neighbors.