State AGs confront Craigslist over sex ads
Three state attorneys general and representatives from six other states on Tuesday pressed lawyers from Craigslist to permanently remove the site's erotic services section.
Leading the charge at the closed meeting in Manhattan was Connecticut's top prosecutor, Richard Blumenthal, reports CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace.
"No question, absolutely none, that here," Blumenthal said. "We're going after them to persuade them they ought to do the right thing, cooperate, and eliminate the ads."
South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster went further: Craigslist must remove all prostitution ads and pornography or Craigslist executives themselves will be prosecuted.
"It is nothing but filth," McMaster said. "It is advertisement for prostitution. It is ugly. It is harmful."
Can Craigslist be held criminally liable or sued for having illegal ads on its site? Not under current federal law, which grants immunity to sites like Craigslist for posting content it didn't create.
"Congress' rationale, which I think was a good one, that we want to not make illegal content legal or somehow inexcusable but place the onus on the people who are behaving badly in the first place," said Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The pressure on the classified online ad site, which gets 30 million postings a month, has grown in recent weeks after medical student Philip Markoff was accused of robbing two women, and killing another, all of whom he met on Craigslist, and a New York radio reporter was killed by a teenager who allegedly responded to a Craigslist advertisement.
In a statement, Craigslist's CEO Jim Buckmaster said Tuesday's meeting was productive.
"We're optimistic that our shared concerns can be addressed...without compromising the quintessentially American values of free speech embodied in our constitution," Buckmaster said.
In November, Craigslist, at the urging of the states attorneys general, agreed to begin requiring a working phone number, a credit card, and a $5 fee for anyone using the erotic services section.
Blumenthal said that the action hasn't gone far enough and that if Craigslist doesn't respond positively in days, not months, the states' prosecutors will consider trying to change the law or finding another route to legal action against the site.
I see the same "filth" in the newspaper classifieds. The same "filth" is in the back of The Onion and the like. Let me think about this ... wasn't New York Governor Elliot Spitzer busted for a high priced call girl? Now he is eying the NY AG post. I feel so good about the foxes guarding the hen house.
Our AG's need to get a life, fight some real crime and stop spending all their time in porn-land. He who complains the loudest....
Stop legalizing morality.
Craiglist is a classified ad service, not a brothel. The fact that the AG thinks laws first need to be changed to make things illegal, shows they are overreaching their mandate. They don't pressure groups into following laws they, in their personal opinion, believe should be implemented someday.
Their charge is to enforce actual law, not made up/fantasy, wished for laws that may or may not ever be enacted.
Just further proof that there must be no *real* crime out there that the busy-body AGs consider this crap to be a priority.
By the way, in my opinion, prostitution should be legalized and regulated. There are far more crimes committed and will continue to be committed because it is illegal than would happen if it were legalized and regulated. Did no one learn anything from the prohibition of alcohol in the early 20th Century? There's a reason prostitution is the world's oldest profession. People will always do it and just making it illegal does nothing but keep AG's and lawyers fat and happy and the jails full. If anyone was REALLY serious about cutting the crime surrounding prostitution, they would be trying to legalize it and create safe environments for it. Otherwise it's just a pious rant about unsubstantiated morality and self-righteous oppression of the economically disadvantaged.
You CANNOT legislate morality!
But it is in the Bible! Yes it is in the Bible as an example of how some humans feel compelled to expand God's simple instructions. Any law of man or the Creator, that is applied in a way that is not consistent with the Creator?s way, is not commanded by God and is obeyed in vain!. Unlike many of man?s laws, the laws of the Creator were made for the benefit of man (all humans), man was not made for the benefit of the law. Human welfare and pleasure are the primary goals of the Creator, not obedience to a law! It was the adversary, not the Creator, who told Adam and Eve that their sexual anatomy was shameful and should be covered. The Creator had already declared it to be very good! They chose to believe the adversary, and the ascetics of the world have pushed this false guilt in the name of God ever since.
Then he said to them, "Shabbat was made for mankind, not mankind for Shabbat; (Mar 2:27 CJB)
"For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." (Mat11:30 NKJ)
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psa 16:11 ESV)
You and others might think there is contrary evidence in the scriptures, or your church traditions, that originates with the Creator or the Christ, but it actually originates with a manmade extrapolation of the oral instructions from the Creator. Christ gave examples, concerning those under the Moses Mediated Covenant, showing where even Moses (almost a god to some), and those who sat in Moses' seat of authority down through the generations to the Pharisees of Christ's day, legitimately issued judgments in the name and authority of God, but the rulings were totally inconsistent with God's way and the goal that God's 10 oral instructions were designed to achieve! Christ tried to warn those in His future new covenant church not to repeat what the leaders did in the Moses mediated covenant church, Israel. But did they listen? Nooooo!
"For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. (Mat23:4 NKJ)
you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. (Mat23:13 NKJ)
Most Christian church leaders did not hear any better than the Pharisees. As a result, many Christians are as burdened today with manmade rules as the average Jew was in Christ's day. Christ basically said we should examine the judgment in the scripture or tradition and if it is not consistent with God's simple demand that we love our neighbor as our self and not harm our neighbor, it is null and void!
And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. (Mark7:7 NKJ)
So is there an easier way for each individual to sort out which actions are good and which actions are bad? Yes! You don't have to learn Greek or Hebrew unless you want counsel from the recorded opinions of well meaning but fallible Hebrews and Christians. Their opinions can be helpful but are not always consistent with God's way and goal for humans.
Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Rom13:10 NKJ)
All scripturally based doctrines and laws sink or swim based on their consistency with the Creator?s fundamental principles that all humans are equal(love of self=love of other) and no human should use God?s law to justify forcing their will on their neighbor(wife, another nation, etc.).
36 "Rabbi, which of the mitzvot in the Torah is the most important?"
37 He told him, "'You are to love ADONAI your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.'
38 This is the greatest and most important mitzvah.
39 And a second is similar to it, 'You are to love your neighbor as yourself.'
40 All of the Torah and the Prophets are dependent on these two mitzvot."
(Mat 22:36-40 CJB)
Religious arguments are a waste of time for those who are not struggling with whether sexual pleasure and services or the use of recreational, performance enhancing, nutritional, etc. chemicals are right or wrong in God's eyes.
How can anyone compare a billboard, no matter how large it is or a classified in a local newspaper to a website which is accessible to millions? I have not seen the billboard in Florida or newspaper classifieds but I have seen Craigslist.
Given a choice between sacrificing personal freedom and crime prevention, I would choose later.
The founding fathers are rolling in their graves I'm sure.
You would sacrifice personal freedom for a candy bar. Just tell the truth, you hate freedom, and feel more comfortable without it.
The problem is, that these people can do a lot of damage to Craigslist, but it would have no impact whatsoever on crime.
You forgot on your list of vices, smoking, alcohol, overeating and being lazy.
If you need to lump all vices together, including legal ones and illegal ones, without regard to any common sense, or any ability to separate one from the other, then please, by all means, demonstrate your extremism in full.
I think reasonable people will reject your argument, however.
You're right in that prostitution is illegal. So which is the better choice, having the prostitutes advertise their services openly in an erotic section where they are easy to find and track (and arrest when necessary), or to have them advertise their services secretly in some other "innocent" section (personals? want ads? classifieds?) where they will be difficult to find or track and virtually impossible to arrest?
We won't bother touching the fact that guns, explosives and drugs can all be used to hurt other people, but I can't for the life of me think of a way to hurt someone by having consensual sex with an adult.
Why can't moralistic retardicans at least use someone else's brain instead of proving how impossibly retarded they are?
- by solblack May 7, 2009 9:37 AM PDT
- I would be mad about this but it's coming from the most corrupt state in the union.
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