Legalization and Morals

Here is an interesting story. Thanks to the German social system, if you are out of work for long enough, they can force you to take a job. This wouldn't normally be a problem until prostitution was legalized 2 years ago:

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

So now the state is turning out former secretaries and computer programmers into the sex industry. Wonderful.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

And in this lies the real problems folks, the government does not decide what is moral or immoral. Higher authorities than men decide such things. I've talked about this before. One of the disadvantages of socialism is that it tends to blur the roles of God and Government. Insert slippery slope here.

UPDATE: Evangelical Outpost also is covering this. Volokh Conspiracy believes this story has been overblown by shoddy journalism. The original article that started it in German and was translated here.

(HT: Risawn)