Editorial
The day The West helped torpedo a future for women
- Published: 18 April 2012
If The Record – or any other newspaper – were to publish an editorial asserting that the problem of methamphetamine production in suburban drug laboratories was obviously impossible to stamp out and that the best course of action to handle this pernicious problem would be to legalise drug production in contained areas for later sale in the nightclubs of Northbridge, people would think this were odd.
If an editorial asserted that child pornography is impossible to stamp out and therefore the best policy would be legalisation and containment, people would probably find this suggestion offensive and bizarre.
If an editorial asserted that the problem of domestic battery was, regrettably, extremely difficult or impossible to stamp out and that therefore the best policy would be to legalise it in some suburbs where it could be ‘contained’, readers would think that whoever authored such a tract had lost a substantial grip on reality.
These three examples, chosen at random, help highlight the pseudo-intellectualism of The West Australian newspaper’s editorial of April 11 substantially backing Attorney General Christian Porter’s legislation drafted to legalise prostitution in Western Australia.
The first, but by no means the least, glaring problem with The West’s editorial was its false characterisation of the debate as being between the “realistic approach” of legalisation and containment, and the ‘impossibility’ of stamping out prostitution completely.
In fact, the debate has always been between those who support legalisation and those who see very clearly the dangers it represents and this alone reveals the false nuance of the editorial.
Nevertheless, those who support the first position were characterised as reasonable while those who oppose it were characterised as possessed of an unreasonable, moralistic mindset, blinding them to reality.
But here is an interesting question: could The West Australian apply the same philosophical principles that it has brought to bear on prostitution’s proposed legalisation to the three examples of human exploitation outlined above?
In any argument or moral discourse, intellectual consistency is a fundamental requirement.
One cannot, for example, assert that all human beings have certain inalienable rights and then assert that some human beings do not.
To do so would make any discussion of human rights impossible, rendering it a useless exercise.
To do so would merely be an attempt to erect a pseudo-intellectual veneer of respectability in order to mask a falsehood.
This problem was manifested in the headline ‘Attempts to outlaw sex work are futile,’ despite the fact that what is under debate is not any kind of work (as if prostitution is no different to clocking on to a shift at the local factory) but human sexual exploitation and degradation of the grossest kind.
The first problem of The West’s editorial is that it cannot be applied to any other comparable situations without, rightly, causing outrage. This therefore reveals the deep flaw of its logic.
Meanwhile, three parliamentary opponents of legalised prostitution, the newspaper lamented, were “unfortunately” aiming to block the bill because of moral objections.
And yet many would wonder what the problem with having a moral objection to the most widespread form of modern-day slavery could possibly be?
These were chastised for wanting a sunset clause inserted, phasing legalised prostitution out in five years.
Their opposition was patronisingly described as “wishful thinking at its most idealistic and absurd” but it seems rather relevant to wonder who is really being absurd here: politicians (at least half of WA’s Parliament, apparently) who have moral objections to human slavery or a daily newspaper that does not – or cannot – apply basic principles of intellectual consistency.
Given that prostitution has been debated in WA since Labor Attorney General Jim McGinty first attempted legalisation in 2007, it is remarkable that the state’s major newspaper only proposes the same response that has been tried and spectacularly failed in numerous countries over the last 100 years – take the Netherlands, for example – causing untold human misery and death in the process.
That The West Australian can give major daily headlines and coverage to cases of sexual abuse in the courts but not manage to join the dots on the essential similarities between these and what happens in prostitution is almost tragic.
Given that a growing number of other countries are adopting measures based on a personalist or human analysis of what’s wrong with prostitution and the power relationships that are its essence, and that in these countries truly remarkable advances have been demonstrated, it is remarkable that The West gives every sign of being oblivious to what has been happening in the world.
Its editorial position on legalising the ownership of women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploitation borders on culpable for its contribution to institutionalising human exploitation and degradation and, almost as disturbingly, looks just plain ignorant in the most bourgeois ways.
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