Pedagogues for Prostitution

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amnesty international photo The next great cause, now popular in academia, is legalizing prostitution.

The author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement, [Dr. Tom] Roach based much of his presentation [at the University of Maryland recently] on the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a French philosopher who died of AIDS and was accused of deliberately infecting his partners with the deadly disease.

“In the mid-1970’s,” says the LGBT History website, “Foucault taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He became enamored with San Francisco and its liberated gay sexuality—especially the bathhouses.” Foucault declared, “I think that it is politically important that sexuality be able to function … as in the bathhouses. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, your own past, in your own identity.”

Those bathhouses were notorious incubators of AIDS.

Roach’s presentation ventured the opinion that the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision was a last ditch effort by the capitalist power structure and the state to keep homosexuals under control by extending the institution of marriage to them.

An event later the same year as the court’s gay marriage decision, a federal raid on the Rentboy prostitution website, also figured prominently in the Roach presentation. His PowerPoint described it as the “policing of extramarital, potentially unassimilable intimacies.”

Most interestingly, Roach said, The New York Times had condemned the federal raid on Rentboy. Indeed, the paper, in an editorial, commented that “The criminal complaint is so saturated with sexually explicit details, it’s hard not to interpret it as an indictment of gay men as being sexually promiscuous.”

The Times had argued that Rentboy was simply “a company that provided sex workers with a safer alternative to street walking or relying on pimps. The defendants have not been accused of exploiting sex workers, featuring minors on the website, financial crimes or other serious offenses that would warrant a federal prosecution.”

Hence, prostitution is now just “sex work.”

The Times noted—and Professor Roach also mentioned—that Amnesty International (AI) had announced that it would be pushing for the decriminalization of “consensual sex work” worldwide. Last August AI announced that it had passed a resolution “to protect the human rights of sex workers.”

The big brain behind this approach is George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, who was promoting the idea for over a decade that illegal drugs and prostitution should not only be legalized but taxed and regulated, and thus approved by the government.

Looking at the evidence for this campaign back in 2006, we commented that the purpose was “to transform American society into one in which the use of dangerous drugs and the practice of prostitution are accepted and protected by the government.”

The Roach presentation at the “Queer Beyond Repair” University of Maryland symposium may seem extreme to some people. But the state-funded University of Maryland had described its “Queer Beyond Repair” symposium as laying the groundwork for a total and complete revolution, away from “imperial rule and anti-blackness” to exploring “the psychic and material structures of liberal politics itself.”

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

Photo by Amnesty International Mount Allison