Houston police, not having anything really important to do and needing to look busy, busy, busy, busted a prostitution ring today. No release yet of the client list but their are rumors that doctors, lawyers, and athletes are on the list.
Local media, never one to miss a chance to snicker, kick people when they are down, and generally not question authority, covered it like it was at least as important as a Supreme Court ruling.
Big surprise.
Why is this story important? Why are the police making the effort to bust women who answered ads on Craig's List and the like to sell their bodies for sex to Houston men? Well, it is tax free income, but that seems to be an issue for the IRS, not the local police.
There are illegal immigrant girls and women who publicly work as taxi dancers in Houston but who are actually sold into "white slavery" to pay off the men who brought them to the United States. Heroin is big in the area high schools. Carjacking and murder are significant problems in Houston. People who know each other kill each other more often than not. How much white collar crime occurs here? Women are beaten, abused, run over in the streets and left for dead. Kids can't walk to and from school without someone trying to harm them. The District Attorney and the Sheriff were abusing their offices by paying their former lover almost $100,000 a year and using inmate labor. Neither were indicted. A person usually has to go to a third world country or at least Illinois to find that kind of corruption.
Harris County sends more people to Death Row than any other county in Texas and there is a high probability that some of those convicted of capital murder were in fact not guilty. But that isn't nearly as important an issue as getting well educated men locked up for paying for sex
But prostitutes are a high priority. Evidently the City of Houston will collapse in shame if women profit from sex with a consenting doctor, lawyer, or athlete for money. Evidently this is the most important issue facing the streets of Houston, Texas in these modern times. Why all authority and government will simply dissolve and there will be chaos if this prostitution circle remains unbroken. It gives the news people--of which the female of the species looks remarkably like a streetwalker when delivering this "news" to viewers who are no doubt shocked, shocked! to learn that Houston has a whore problem--something "dirty" to talk about. They can shake their heads, shame the bad boys, and look like they could spank the bad boys at the same time.
Yes, yes, prostitution is naughty and not nice. People will be embarrassed. Marriages will break up when the list comes to light. Women who were not the natural object of their husbands' bounty got money that should have gone to wives and children. Perhaps drugs were involved. But there has got to be more serious crimes being committed than prostitution between well to do people.
Houston simply does not have the number of police it should for the population. The size of this bust, if it grows beyond the arrest of the pimps--a husband and wife team--and the man hours worked to make the case might be huge. The public will enjoy discussing who's who on the list but they won't be getting their tax dollar's worth. Chances are, the "johns" will do no jail time, simply pay a fine and go on with their lives. The women involved will be punished more severely. The pimps should owe some taxes, answer local charges and then perhaps some federal ones if they don't have the money to pay their taxes but it isn't going to stop someone else from using the Internets to find companionship.
And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says today that it is constitutionally kosher for Texas school children to have a moment of silence to do whatever they wish--pray, not pray, think of Zen koans, make an inventory of the desks, their souls, of the people they have wronged, make a mental note to meet their heroin connection, hope the police caught the rapist who attacked them on campus while the police failed to see it with the expensive surveillance equipment--because it doesn't, according to a three judge panel, advance religion. Well, if it doesn't, then why all the wrangling to get a law passed to allow for a moment of silence? It has got to be unconstitutional but as long as we are wondering about something as silly as prostitution on the news, there isn't time to consider the really important issues like how the rest of us live with government and the worship of authority.
