Kamala Harris, Foe of Legal Sex Work, Questions Whether Laws Exist That Control Male Bodies

Fun fact: All laws give government control of the decisions that everybody of any gender can do with their bodies.

While grilling Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh about whether he'd vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) posed a question she thought was so clever that she decided to highlight the exchange on Twitter:

Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?pic.twitter.com/lDcXPZ56hX

— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) September 6, 2018

Some tweeters immediately shot back with "conscription." It's a good point—federal law requires men to register with Selective Service and face the possibility of being drafted to fight in wars—but it doesn't go far enough. Harris' wording inadvertently reminds us that virtually all laws give the government the power to make decisions about bodies, both male and female. The drug war, for example, is all about controlling what people put into their bodies.

Harris is a former prosecutor, and she was California's attorney general before getting elected to the Senate. In those roles, she was not just a willing participant but a loud advocate of the war on sex work. As a prosecutor she went after the men behind Backpage.com, aiming to hold them responsible for the existence of online sex trafficking.

Surely laws against sex work give the government the power to make decisions about male and female bodies. If you are a woman (or man, but really we only talk about the women) who wants to offer up your body for sexual pleasure in exchange for money, Harris is here to use government force to try to stop you. Harris is no supporter of women's right to decide what they do with their body in areas outside of abortion, and it's cynical and grotesque (but sadly predictable) that she'd use Kavanaugh's hearing to present herself as such.

The ultimate irony is the reason why Harris has taken her anti-sex-trafficking role: She argues that it harms innocent children who are forced into the sex trade. In reality, the vast majority of "sex trafficking" busts involve behavior between consenting adults, but set that aside. According to Harris, women cannot decide for themselves what to do with their bodies because the results will harm innocent children. That's the exact same argument used by those who would ban abortion!

Bonus links: Elizabeth Nolan Brown on Harris' phony feminism. And at least one woman on Twitter responded to Harris asking her why she's trying to stop women from participating in sex work if she holds such a position. Don't hold your breath waiting for a response.

Comments

[Tom Bombadil]

Selective service jumped out at me immediately too.

Also, rape seems to be frowned on.

[Square = Circle]

Rape laws apply to everyone - it's just that most rapists are men.

But conscription, along with out-and-out slavery, is pretty much the oldest form of government-dictating-what-you-do-with-your-body there is. Older than laws against either prostitution or abortion, by far.

[Jerry B.]

Yep. I did not volunteer to go to Viet Nam, but the government sent me there anyway. Don't recall interacting with any female draftees.

[Mickey Rat]

Sex trafficking laws set limits on other people's choices to prevent theoretical harm to unknown children. A law against abortion aims to prevent a definite harm to specific children. That is not quite the same thing, but nice try on the faulty logic.

[Fats of Fury]

Sex work is such a stupid euphemism.

[Leo Kovalensky II]

Think about what some of these Johns look like. I'm sure there's a lot of work involved in preparing oneself to deal with that...

[Bearded Spock]

This is a good argument for legalization; the government can then mandate hazard pay for hookers.

[Juice]

Is it a euphemism if it's literally what it is?

[bevis the lumberjack]

Expecting chuckleheads like Harris to be intellectually consistent or intellectually honest is similar to expecting dogs to perform brain surgery. You're just going to end up disappointed.

[Enjoy Every Sandwich]

Sen. Kamala Harris (D?Calif.) posed a question she thought was so clever that she decided to highlight the exchange on Twitter

The fact that she thought this was clever tells us all we need to know about her fitness to hold any position of authority.

[Mickey Rat]

That is the level of clever from any identity politics ideologue, that their particular concern does not happen to anyone outside their group.

[Dillinger]

yep.

[Calidissident]

The wannabe 2020 Democratic contenders are going to some really pathetic lengths for attention.

[Fist of Etiquette]

The twittersphere actually thinks she did a good job.

[Leo Kovalensky II]

Well, roughly half, I would assume.

[swillfredo pareto]

Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?

In addition to drug, conscription and prostitution policies as already mention, the government use it's power to:

Forbid me as a male from selling my labor below an arbitrary rate;
Forbid me as a male from selling my organs,
Forbid me as a male from contracting with someone to terminate my life.

The list goes on and on. Basically every progressive program in existence.

[sharmota4zeb]

The best parallel is medical procedures on the male reproductive system. It's illegal to go to a back alley for a vasectomy. It's illegal for a male to sell his sperm for artificial insemination on the black market. ect.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Kamala Harris is merely protecting women from what men do with their bodies.

[ricbee]

What's that supposed to mean?

[dchang0]

Except that women are all too happy to take tax money from mostly men using the power of gov't. That's taking from men's bodies (the labor they perform using their bodies) to give to women.

Stefan Molyneux went over the stats. Single moms on welfare get most of their tax transfers from married and single men (breadwinners, heads of households).

So essentially, we have tax-harems where any given taxpaying family man is likely to be supporting both his wife AND a single mom he doesn't even know AND the children of these women.

Is Harris going to protect men from what women do with their bodies (have children out of wedlock, then go on welfare)?

[Fancylad]

And who's going to protect the baby from what the abortionist is planning to do to its body?

[Jerryskids]

It's the most blatant hypocrisy for Harris to say she's against prostitution - she got where she's at by whoring herself out to Willie Brown.

[Tony]

This is dumb and irrelevant and you know that.

But I don't think abortion is sold on its merits well enough. "Let women choose to do what they want with their body" doesn't address the fetus = person argument. Such rhetoric convinces no one. Women can't, for example, use their bodies to intentionally smother a baby. They aren't allowed to head butt a little darling and give him a concussion.

Unfortunately "fetus = person" is just simple enough for the masses to buy it, while, like in so many other political debates, the liberal position has some measure of nuance. You can't fit "A fetus does not have personhood status in our legal tradition, and therefore erring on the side of liberty requires government not forcing women to give birth against their will."

Making it about choice doesn't solve anything. If it's murder, all you're saying is you want to choose to murder.

[DesigNate]

The liberal position has all the nuance of "beating the drums about this one issue gets us votes". You all don't care about anyone's choice or privacy in any other aspect of their lives or our government policy, especially twat waffles like Kamala Harris.

[Tony]

I just said that privacy and choice are irrelevant if one interlocutor thinks it's baby murder. (Of course that person should be required to advocate for life in prison for women who get abortions.)

My principal concern is not having religious doctrine be American law. Banning abortion runs afoul of the Establishment Clause as far as I'm concerned. But liberal politicians don't like to play the secular card.

[DesigNate]

I mean, it is objectively murder since it is 1. an individual human being with its own dna, and 2. it is alive.

Now let's see how you try to assume my position...

[Tony]

How is something totally physically dependent on another human an "individual"? And mold is alive too.

But if that's what you want to believe, you must necessarily endorse charging women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them with first-degree baby murder.

[DesigNate]

You really don't understand how reproductive science works, do you?

You see when a sperm impregnates an egg, two strands of DNA combine and begin the process of mitosis. These cells keep dividing and dividing, building a completely unique human at the early stage of human development. Just because the woman acts as incubation chamber for 10 months doesn't preclude the zygote from being an individual.

I mean, you don't have to deny science to support a woman's right to control her body. But you couldn't help beclowning yourself and then assuming that stated objective fact has to lead to Pat Robertson's wet dream.

And yes, I know mold is alive. And if you dump bleach on it, you are, in fact, killing it.

[Tony]

Just because the woman acts as incubation chamber for 10 months doesn't preclude the zygote from being an individual.

That's literally what it means. It's part of a two-genome parasitic relationship. Individual, noun, a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family. There can be an individual without a mother. There can't be a fetus without an incubator.

At any rate I could concede all that and still we'd be talking semantics instead of anything relevant. Children don't have the same set of rights as adults. The brain-dead don't have the same set of rights as the lucid. The incarcerated vs. free, etc. We give different sets of rights to different types of "individuals" all over the place.

Thus it comes down to the ethical and the practical. Making a fetus a person with a right to life means women lose some rather vital rights of adult humans. Nobody said it wasn't a zero-sum situation, some people just think it's perfectly OK for the jackbooted thugs of the state to hold women down and force them to give birth against their will. Some of us have different ethical and practical priorities.

[rudehost]

Yes you think it's perfectly OK for the jackbooted thugs of the state to force people to do almost anything else.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

It can't be an individual without a father either. So why only single party decision in a three party argument?

[Jerry B.]

How is something totally physically dependent on another human an "individual"?

So a child born with profound developmental difficulties that will never be able to take care of itself isn't an individual?

[Tony]

What does being an individual have to do with having rights? My cat is an individual.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

And yet, of I kill or injure your cat I can be punished.

[Tony]

But not as much as if you kill a baby.

Do you think women who get abortions should be sent to death row?

[Tom Dial]

Discussion of "something totally physically dependent on another human" is a dead end in this discussion. To see that, it is only necessary to consider the question of infants: they, too, for quite a number of years after birth, are totally dependent on (at least) another human being for survival and a good deal more.

In general, the arguments for abortion would apply nearly equally and verbatim to infanticide. Unsurprisingly, quite a few people might find that somewhere between disturbing and unacceptable.

[Get To Da Chippah]

Leftists like Tony, having long ago lost the battle to consider blacks less than people, now fervently hope to keep another group of living homo sapiens from attaining legal personhood.

[TangoDelta]

The whole fetus=person nonsense is going away thanks to technology. Once they figure out the whole sous-vied artificial womb thing it's going to be a simple matter of transferring the wannabe sprog and hooking it up to the matrix all paid for by the infertile couple who've been trying for so long and won't have to worry about the fickleness of a surrogate.

[JoeBlow123]

Why is this abortion debate coming back? Even my evangelical Christian parents understand that ship has sailed. The vast majority of the country gives no cares about this crap.

This is all bullshit political theater and all the same people keep returning to their assigned seats like dutiful slaves.

[MarkLastname]

"A fetus magically becomes a person when you pull it out of a vagina" isn't a nuanced position.

You're strawnanning again; but that's all you ever do. Why not err on the side of liberty and let mothers leave their infants to starve? Is it not a violation of their freedom to force them to feed their kids?

A line has to be drawn somewhere after which it enjoys legal rights. The arbitrary date you pick differs from the one someone else picked. That doesn't make you more nuanced.

[sharmota4zeb]

Well said, Shackford.

[DesigNate]

Her twitter is a buffet of idiocy.

[Nuwanda]

Meh, it's just begging the question. Every law dictates what we may do since it delimits our choices. Taxation in general restricts our freedom of action.

Is the revelation meant to be that Harris is a hypocrite? Oh, no. Really?

[Rockabilly]

I admit I'm not the brightest bulb in the lot but her bulb is even dimmer than mine.

[newlibertarian]

That Harris is a lawyer and former prosecutor underscores the problem with racial preferences in law schools. It just seems impossible, even in the current dumbed-down academic environment, Harris was accepted to law school on merit alone.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Race or sex? The world may never know. Might be interesting to see some of those partition papers from back on the day.

[Inigo Montoya]

Well, at least Harris wasn't accepted to law school based on falsely claiming to be Native American. Out of every minority, that group has probably been consistently shafted the worse by government, even in modern times, and so it's disgusting to see fakers trying to cash in. At least it's pretty evident that Harris isn't faking her minority status.

That said, Harris seems to me to be every bit as much of an authoritarian twit as Trump. And the fact she is a former prosecutor probably makes her even worse. Unfortunately, she's exactly the sort of power-grabber who will run, and likely do well.

[TangoDelta]

I'm confident it was merit. I'm sure she has the innate ability to reflexively swallow not spit. Let's face it, high performance hummers are worthy of merit, right?

Edit(?): Maybe I forgot to capitalize a trademark, maybe I didn't.

[Joaquim]

What about laws that forbid males (and females) t? use their mouths to suck on plastic straws?

[TangoDelta]

I can't help but wonder if this isn't what happens when you hire some doe-eyed twenty-something to handle your twaddle account or whether she's actually that stupid. Having lived in Sud Cali for almost a decade I'm leaning toward the latter.

[ricbee]

Harris should be all for prostitution.Half the hookers here are men.

[bud]

I recall suicide is not allowed for men. I cant think of any more body controlling law than that one. Kamala tried to be cute and clever with this question. So brave.. Im surprised it wasn't followed by a cued set of protesters jumping up with poms-poms..

[dchang0]

Calling Harris cute is sexist.
So is calling her by her first name.

[DrZ]

Come visit California. Even though we are not part of the United States of America, we do have 110 volt outlets. Contrary to popular rumor you can charge your smartphone in California.

[dchang0]

There's an anti-manspreading ban on the NYC transit system. Some men were already arrested under this ban.

I am absolutely sure that Harris would also try to limit men like so:

1) anti-catcalling ban such as that in France
2) anti-mansplaining ban
3) anti-ogling ban (directed only at men ogling women)

I'm sure the Mens Rights Activists and MGTOW experts can rattle off a huge list of other restrictions that only affect or disproportionately harm men (especially in family court).

[macsnafu]

How many more "clever" comments do we need for the rest of the people to see how hypocritical Kamala Harris is?

[Dadlobby]

The lack of reproductive rights and parental rights for men and men forced to pay for the reproductive choices of women. His body, his no choice to walk away from an unintended pregnancy and then forced to work to pay for a child that he doesn't want for 18 years or better (under threat of incarceration no less). Of course should he want the baby she can decide to abort it with no notice, much less with input on his part. Unilateral divorce (85% field by women) force him to pay for children he is not allowed to raise (85% mother custody), might be able to "visit" 4 days a month, and often is totally removed from him. Ironically, 85% of child abuse and neglect occurs in single mother homes (live in boyfriend the #2 perp behind mommy). The Gynocentric "can't understand normal thinking" Harris would certainly not see this from her "victimized" state. Did I mention men are 97% of work place injuries and death and 97% of war casualties?

[moschinoonline]

No they don't birth control by definition stops the pairing of the gamete cells. You are completely and utterly wrong. Yes there are abortion inducing pills, but those are given by doctors and patients are instructed that they are aborting a fetus. So stop it with the fucking lying. Also the morning after pill is not an abortion pill either. That is a common misconception of low information people.

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[killboyumeed847548588]

When people are asked to use gut instinct to stop real but rare horrors, relying on racial stereotypes and other biases tends to rule.

Is that why the cops pulled a gun on my friend the day I moved him and his babby mamma into my town. It's strange how one of the other regulars at the Wellness Center died of a drug overdoes latter that night in the Wellness Center bathroom.