Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

Wow. The things my friends and I discuss over coffee . . .

But last week John and I wandered onto the subject of my year in Odessa, Texas, as a young cop reporter — the fortunate one on the newspaper staff who gets to report on, and witness the aftermath of, the violent crimes, the bloody car wrecks and plane crashes, and the blistering examples of poverty- and abuse-turned-vice in the paper’s circulation area. That was me in 1983. I’m not sure it was the best job for a 22-year-old away from home for the first time in a terribly violent city with no friends or family. But I did have T.J. and Casey, and I was blessed to call them friends.

These women worked as prostitutes out of the stately confines of Odessa’s Antler Inn, a rundown motel just off the grungiest bar- and strip-joint slice of this racial tinderbox of 100,000 people suddenly aware that massive resources of oil in the Permian Basin was, in the early 1980s, no longer a guarantee of continued prosperity. I had proposed a series of articles on the sex trade in Odessa, and their subsequent publication garnered me the admiration of my more refined peers and the wrath of West Texas Christiandom, which found myriad ways to express fury over Sunday newspapers that discussed oral sex and lesbianism. I couldn’t get a seat in a restaurant or cash a check at a store for weeks, it seemed, but during my research, I met these two women and we became friends.

Besides being one of the geographically ugliest places I’ve ever seen, Odessa was hostage to the fluctuations of the oil market. Frustration reigned and rage simmered among men accustomed not to the excesses of great wealth, perhaps, but to steady work in relatively high-paying jobs and the accompanying prestige of big trucks, big belt buckles, and big-haired women. The sex trade flourished, as it does when men accustomed to victory find themselves drowning in loss — that is, if “flourished” is the word for dirty sex in dirty surroundings with angry men and thoroughly defeated women.

Casey and T.J. were, in ways of the heart and the pocketbook, thoroughly defeated women, beaten in body and spirit by those who should have loved them, and smart enough to know how to work through it. They were heroin addicts, and their love for each other, however dysfunctional at times, was profound; it kept them alive, I’m convinced, after nights and days of impersonal sex with men who held them in utter contempt but needed servicing. They knew what they were. They knew what they weren’t, and they knew that I loved them very much. T.J., in particular, was one of the kindest women I’ve ever known, and I’m sad that we lost touch with each other after she went to prison for heroin possession.

Do I need to say that prostitution is wrong — that it’s sin, both for the woman and for the man? It’s adultery, and it’s unloving; men who frequent prostitutes are not men who have an innate respect for women, and angry men who make use of defeated women act in contempt, not simply lust. Still, I believe that sexual sin in particular comes from a wellspring of need; it’s an illegitimate means of meeting an entirely legitimate need, whether for release, relationship, or respite from something too heavy to bear. Nonetheless, prostitution elevates no one and offends the righteousness of God.

It’s sin, but it shouldn’t be a crime. The purpose of law is not to convey societal disapproval of behavior. If that were the case, then adultery without payment would be illegal, and enforced, and so would multiple and careless marriages, bigotry, and a host of other things that make us sniff in disgust, confident that we’re somehow above such things. Laws exist to protect people, and within the goal of protecting people is the implication that harming them is wrong — societal disapproval of wrongful actions against others is expressed in laws against murder, rape, assault, theft, and driving like an idiot through crosswalks peppered with pedestrians. Evangelicals may argue that no crime and no sin is “victimless,” but we acknowledge, generally, that both the law and the Law are inadequate to secure true morality, and we therefore call for the State to enact laws that protect people and their property, their rights and their livelihoods, from aggression, physical or otherwise.

So if prostitution harms women, and at least causes spiritual injury to men, why not continue to make it illegal? The answer lies in what I’m convinced is the true motivation of anti-prostitution laws, and that is societal disapproval of women who sell sex, not of the transaction or its content.

Women who let men pay to use their bodies are generally not women raised in families or cultures or lifestyles that allowed them the luxury of contemplating various career options. I’m aware of the high-priced, pampered whores who entertain powerful men in relationships they find liberating and reciprocal; I’m also aware that that’s nonetheless a tragedy, and that most prostitutes live and work under the constant reality of rape, assault, theft, and degradation-laced poverty unlike anything you or I could imagine. And while the escorts to the elite enjoy the protection of high-class propriety and madams who watch over them, most sex workers are subject to abuse from both the men who hire them and quite often the men who recruit, pimp, and control them. Or, like Casey and T.J., they work independently, which means they keep their earnings but have no pimp to beat the hell out of anyone who threatens his investment.

So women who engage in prostitution are vulnerable — vulnerable to the economic, social, psychological, and gender realities that turned them toward prostitution, and vulnerable to the men over them as pimps or under them as johns. They’re quite aware of the disapproval of society. But they need, and deserve, the protection of the law. Women who work as prostitutes have few options for recourse or protection if they’re beaten, robbed, or raped, unlike women who aren’t prostitutes. The reporting of a crime against them requires their taking the very real risk that accompanies an acknowledgment of having engaged in illegal activity — they can be arrested on the basis of information that accompanies their report, and they are disregarded simply as whores who, after all, signed up for it all when they “decided” to turn to prostitution. The woman is left entirely without protection, subject to abuse from johns and pimps and arrest from the police who, I’d venture to say, generally would regard a crime against you or me with much more severity and energy than a crime against a whore.

It’s easy to point out that prostitutes volitionally engage in sex for payment with strangers, which I suppose makes it easy to decide that having made their criminal and immoral beds, these women now have to lie in them. Most of them didn’t enter the world of sex-for-payment with a gun pointed at their heads. That’s true. What’s equally true, though, is that most turned to prostitution out of despair, poverty, and hopelessness — not the despair that we feel when a relationship falls apart, not the economic stresses altogether common to most people at some point in our lives, and not the vague sense of ennui, or even the profound acceptance of profound misfortune, that defines the bleak periods in our lives. Most of us have some resources, internal or external, that weave together to provide a rope of encouragement and expectation that can lift us out of acute or chronic tragedy. But when women lack that, when their lives are riddled with degradation and addiction and abuse and anger and violence, that rope doesn’t exist, and they are led to conclude that legitimate needs can be met, and rent can be paid, through illegitimate means.

It’s about the next fix, or the rent, or dinner; women don’t become prostitutes so that they can give conventional Judeo-Christian morality a stiff middle finger. They don’t becomes whores as a political statement, a “fuck that,” against your values or mine. And I doubt very much that women consider prostitution alongside career options we find acceptable, but are nonetheless out of reach for them — I think the dilemma is not along the lines of, gee, selling my body, or becoming a marine biologist? Enduring long nights of dirty, degrading sex for pay, or getting a bachelor’s degree in English? I’ve written before that poverty has much more to do with a paucity of education, a lack of economic means and advancement, and entrenched political disenfranchisement than simply with a shortage, however chronic, of cash. A society truly concerned with Biblical morality would be infinitely more concerned with expressing disapproval of the political, educational, economic, sexual and cultural factors that drive women into prostitution than it would be to simply label her actions as wrong — wrong, and therefore illegal, and therefore removing them from the protection they require and deserve. Such a society — and we don’t have it now — would reject simplistic calls for preserving Biblical sexual morality through legislation and would, instead, devote itself to the understanding that prostitutes, like everyone else whose degradation, rejection, and disenfranchisement makes them “least of these” of whom Christ spoke — with whom he identified, for whom he died — are worthy of mercy. Law cannot make people righteous, but it can express some framework of mercy that the Church could operate in. Likewise, the absence of laws against certain things doesn’t convey societal approval, and Christians needn’t be worried that without laws against it, prostitution will become an exciting career option for their daughters, or that the absence of legal disapproval will result in a wholesale overhaul of sexual mores.

It comes down to what it is we truly value. I would hope that the Body of Christ would be infinitely more concerned with the well-being of women, of daughters and sisters and mothers, than with the need to encode into law what Christ and they, and I, find morally objectionable. But we tend to value morality more than we value women. Opening our arms — our protective and loving arms — to prostitutes, and removing the barriers to their claims for police protection, would, I know, be a far more moral and Christlike approach to healing sexual sin in society. Lamentably, it’s easier — less messy and less risky to the gleaming tidiness of our own little sexual cocoons — to try to please the Lord Jesus by standing on the right side of the law instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the devastated women he died for.