A Word Please

According to an article in the May edition of Reason magazine, the New Orleans police and prosecutors charge their city’s prostitutes as sex offenders. This, in itself, baffles me. The term “sex offenders” has lost its edge. It can be a rapist, it can apparently be a prostitute, or it can be a guy who gets drunk and pees in a public park. Why would we want to lump all these crimes under one heading?

This article goes on to state that, of 863 people on New Orleans’ sex offender list, 483 were charged under this fairly recent prostitution law. These “sex offenders” were engaging in consensual (albeit, paid) sex. These women now have to register as sex offenders, their licenses are stamped with the sex offender status, and they must report their status to all their neighbors and future employers.

Shouldn’t a sex offender be someone we need to worry about? Someone dangerous? We may not all agree with prostitution as a profession but most of us do agree that prostitutes are not in the same league as a rapist or child molester.

What truly bothered me about this article was the absence of the prostitutes’ customers on the sex offender list. If the prostitute is a sex offender, then, by default, shouldn’t her (or his) customer be as well? They are both consenting in the act. They are both well aware of what they are doing. Without the customers, there would be no prostitute. Yet, only the prostitute pays the price with the sex offender stamp.

Furthermore, once we label these prostitutes with the general sex offender stamp, they cannot get a legitimate job anywhere. Who wants to hire a registered sex offender? No one stops and looks into the realities of the “crime”. Prospective employers simply look at that label and there is no way they are going to hire that person. We claim to want to stop prostitution, yet this very law forces these women (and men) to continue in the profession by taking away any reasonable and legal choices.

Should you get fired from your job for smoking pot, providing you have a prescription that says you’re allowed to do so? According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine, this is happening all over the country. Employers are firing their employees for failing a drug test, despite the fact that the marijuana in their system is legal and their job performance has not been a problem. Many of these cases have gone to court. According to the article, so far judges in California, Washington, Montana, and Oregon have sided with the employers.

This doesn’t seem like a fair standard. Oxycontin and Vicodin are much more powerful than marijuana, yet employees are not being fired for using those drugs. In these cases, we are talking about the legal use of marijuana for medical purposes, not recreational drug use. If a state is going to make the use of medical marijuana legal, then “failing” a drug test for that same drug should not be legal cause for termination. After all, you don’t get fired for having Oxycontin in your system – that is, providing you have a prescription.

Of course, this is just my opinion. But, it seems to me, our courts need to start backing up the laws made by our government, at both the local and national levels. Otherwise, there is a whole lot of confusion and innocent people get tossed around in the resulting whirlwind.