How Did San Francisco Propositions Do?

Yay on Obama, yay on 4, yay for trains, yay on prop k.

Bummed about prop H and hugely bummed about prop 8. How can it be this close? Maybe we really do need to wait until another generation dies off, but crap! I guess the court system is the next stop.

Really glad to see Prop K go down (as it were.) The day the DCCC endorsed K and threw poor women under the wheels of the progressive bus is a shameful day. Here's hoping they get some awareness of what prostitution really is before this issue comes up again.

These numbers are for SF only, so while Prop 8 was defeated here,it won across CA. Boo hiss.

http://www.sfgov.org/site/elections_index.asp?id=70720

Who really thinks that the voter turnout was only 49%? According to that site, my absentee ballot hasn't been counted yet...

P.S. That one said he stands for change! Clearly he must be some sort of radical socialist monster!!!

P.P.S. Change we can believe in: none.

SamSez,

In my eyes prop K was more about ending discrimination against people just because of their profession.

In some societies butchers, undertakers, and janitors are considered dirty and undesirable. Fortunately most of the world treats them better than that.

The U.S. treats the men and women of the sex industry as second-class citizens, mostly for lingering conservative religious/social class reasons. I hope someday we can end that and build a new class of proud, unionized prostitutes who are given the respect and honor that their profession deserves, like they have in many more enlightened countries. Unfortunately this is the U.S., and even SF is too prudish for that right now, it sees.

Prostitution is not a profession. It is abuse. If you look behind the few spokesmodels put in front of the media, prostitution is about johns who want to screw girls and young women, and it's about pimps who convince those girls that they can claw their way out of poverty by turning tricks.

The reality is that the pimp eventually turns violent or turns into your drug pusher. The reality is that as you age your price goes way down so you have to do more acts (aka anal) in higher volume to pay the rent. The reality is that your pimp and "friends" will tell you that there's nothing else you can do, once you've been in the life you can't do any other work. The reality is that you lose a certain amount of self esteem every time you have sex you don't want to have with people who disgust you.

The big reality is that legalization or decriminalization or criminalization don't change any of those realities.

Prostitution isn't noble or romantic or sexy. It leaves burnt-out women behind who try desperately to forget what happened to their bodies while they tried to go somewhere else in their head.

Rich girls don't go into prostitution. Poor girls do and they do it because they don't have other options. Can you find a handful of exceptions? Of course. But that doesn't change the reality of most prostitutes. Prop K would make the lives of most prostitutes worse.

Yes, Greg, prostitution "might" be safer if it were legal, depending on how the laws were written.

But Prop K wasn't legalization, it was decriminalization. The cops were to be directed to ignore prostitution AND pimping. If someone complains about pimps, too damn bad, the cops are supposed to treat them like fine upstanding citizens.

Prostitution laws are state and federal laws. The city can not change them. Prostitutes know they are still breaking the law. They are not going to be more or less likely to report assaults under Prop K.

And let's talk about the assaults. The nature of prostitution is that two people are naked and alone in a room. If a woman is assaulted in that circumstance, what is her recourse? If she goes to the police they have only her word for it. That is true for prostitutes and nonprostitutes.

Prostitution is dangerous by it's very nature. When you throw in the fact that most johns want young compliant girls (barely legal, spinners, college girls, etc,) how likely are they to go to the cops and insist that charges be filed?

The way Prop K was written, the cops couldn't even walk up to a young looking prostitute to find out if she was underage because that would be "investigating prostitution." SF would see an explosion in child prostitution similar to what's going on in Oakland. In fact, the East Bay's prostitution industry would probably drive across the bridge and end up here. Why not go where the cops have been told to ignore you?

The city would also be prohibited from taking funds to investigate trafficking. Handing a woman a brochure in their own language explaining that she didn't have to stay with her trafficker would be considered "racial profiling."

If this measure had just said that prostitutes could not be arrested, I think it would have passed with flying colors. But the author threw in all this other weird stuff protecting pimps and destroying the SAGE project.

I don't know anyone who thinks that prostitutes should be arrested. I also don't know anyone who thinks we should be coddling and protecting pimps. Hence the problem with Prop K.

"this is coming out to be a rather pyrric victory."

Well, not really a Pyrrhic victory, as it's not like everyone sacrificed all those other things to help Obama win. If Obama had lost, those ballot initiatives probably would've gone about the same way.

(Well, it's debatable, because African-American turnout helped carry 8 to victory, but now I'm just nitpicking my own nitpick. Yay!)