Actually, not anymore according to the Chicago Sun Times. After a group of 17 state attorney’s stated that there wasn’t enough controls on the site to stop potential prostitution advertising in their adult ads section.
Per the Sun Times –
Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, said there weren’t enough protections against potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution. “The trafficking of children, young girls and women for sex is a horrifying reality,” Madigan said Saturday. “If today’s action by Craigslist prompts other websites, such as backpage.com, to respond to the pulbic’s demand to stop turning a blind eye to the devastation human trafficking causes, it will protect the lives of children and women in Illinois and across the country.”
Seriously?
Is Lisa Madigan and the other 16 State Attorney’s that naive or just that stupid?
The issue of human trafficing is a very serious problem and needs people to take very serious attention and action. This is like trying to stop people from using their phones while driving by taking down billboards of phone ads.
People may get upset by my little article, but holy shit! FOCUS PEOPLE!
I will say as a sidenote, kudos to Craigslist for not even getting in a pissing match over this. They just took that portion of the site down and put up a banner saying “Censored”
This is how we make life harder and harder on ourselves. We continue to take away the avenues we can use to protect the innocent by trying to protect the stupid.
“Let’s make marijuana illegal so that people can’t hurt themselves” How about we make it legal so we can stop the people that are trying to hurt others?
One of the points that was brought up was the medical student that committed suicide in jail while awaiting trail for killing a masseuse he met through Craigslist. What happened to the masseuse was terrible. But A, this situation had little to nothing to do with prostitution (Unless you are trying to insinuate that she was a prostitute, and at that point, we are going to have some words) B. does not separate Craigslist from other classified ad sites. Or the phone book, or any other form of advertising while you are at it. And C. Why are we now a society on a constant witch hunt?
It used to be that when someone did something bad, we would bring them to justice. If we really wanted to make a point, we would publicize the situation and increase the level of punishment to really hit home the severity of the situation.
Now, we spend considerably less time focused on the person committing the crime and the crime itself, and going after every single person, business and entity that was remotely involved. 10 years from now we will prosecute the person for the crime, sue the website for giving the person the idea (whether he/she got the idea from the site or not) the criminals friends and family will be brought to justice for either knowing that he/she may be capable of doing such a thing or turning a blind eye, the car company for giving them the ability to transport themselves to the scene of the crime, the restaurant or grocery store for giving them the energy to commit the crime, and and the police department for not having the psychic ability to predict that this person would be capable of doing such a thing.
But, sueing Craigslist is a good start.
Even better, we have now made it harder to identify potential prostitution rings, collect evidence to prove that they were advertising themselves, and a method to locate and bring them to Justice. No, we would rather protect the criminals from having the ability to identify themselves.
I have gotten the message and the message is clear, don’t sell your self on the internet unless it is full frontal porn.
Welcome to America, home of the imprisoned, land of the timid. At least, that is where we will be very very soon. Give me liberty! …or not. As long as nobody hurts me physically or emotionally.
To this countries Forefathers, I apologize. I tried to defend freedom and prove it was worth dying for. But I got outnumbered by people who would rather sit inside their homes, riddled with fear, counting on other people to do their dirty work for them. We’re pussies. Sorry to let you down.
I’ll attempt to keep using this free speech thing till they take that too. So, for another year or two.