The Texas government plans to start taxing patrons of strip clubs five dollars to fund sexual assault prevention programs. Their logic is that people who frequent such establishments are more likely to go on to attack women. If that's true--and it may or may not be--I'm not sure why the state wants to discourage them from going there. If, for example, murderers liked to hang out in pool halls then we'd expect police officers to also go to pool halls to find crimminals. They certainly wouldn't want to shut them down.
It's not that the government wants to prevent sexual assualts, they just don't like strip clubs. Oh they cloak such selfishness in nice motivations like "helping battered women" but what they really care about is getting rid of the things they, personally, don't like. Sen. Dan Patrick said it all:
I don't want the fact that the government is making money from them to make them harder to close. I would rather see the businesses close down,Yes, Senator, because it's really all about you.
2 comments:
Where do you get your information about their motivations? Or, more specifically, what does it mean just to not "like" something?
How do you know they aren't responding to political pressure from advocates for, say, women's safety?
It's impossible to really know, isn't it? But I think it's disturbingly revealing even if one assumes they are being honest about their preferences.
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