Quotes

While Senator Barack Obama rejects prostitution and trafficking as an abuse of human rights,  San Francisco voters are being urged to make our city a sanctuary for pimps and traffickers.
What we have to do is to create better, more effective tools for prosecuting those who are engaging in human trafficking and we have to do that within our country. Sadly, there are thousands who are trapped in various forms of enslavement, here in our country - oftentimes young women who are caught up in prostitution. So we've got to give prosecutors the tools to crack down on these human trafficking networks. Internationally, we've got to speak out and we've got to forge alliances with other countries to share intelligence, to roll up the financing networks that are involved in them. It is a debasement of our common humanity, whenever we see something like that taking place.
~ Senator Barack Obama
I exploited my body and gave myself to any man who wanted a piece. It was a vicious lifestyle. What these men don't know -- or maybe what they DO know -- is that prostitutes or streetwalkers or "happy hookers" are women with a deep sense of pain. Most have been abused in unimaginable ways.
~ Brenda Myers-Powell
Proposition K conceals the inhumane nature of prostitution and cripples the efforts of law enforcement, human rights groups and social service agencies to assist those who seek escape from sex-traffickers.
~ Kamala Harris, SF District Attorney
..there is nothing broad-minded about looking the other way when 14-year-old girls and boys sell themselves on the street and massage parlors are staffed by women who are being held against their will. These are not consenting adults.
~ Debra Saunders
Keep trafficking out of city PDF Print E-mail
By Ken Garcia
SF Examiner Staff Writer
9/11/08

It took nearly two years for authorities in Berkeley to extricate its fragrant tree-huggers from their lofty heights on the UC campus, pretty much cementing the city’s place as the wackiest in the West. But wait — don’t count San Francisco out — it’s about to give Berkeley another run for its (streetwalking) money.

Four years ago, Berkeley voters soundly rejected a measure to decriminalize prostitution, which would have directed cops and prosecutors to stop enforcing state laws on prostitution. Now, the same ballot plan goes before San Francisco voters in November under the guise of Proposition K, brought to us by the same sex-trade worker who saw another sales opportunity across the Bay.

That person, Mary Ellen (Maxine) Doogan, happens to be a convicted pimp who ran an escort prostitution agency in Seattle a little more than a decade ago. Doogan was in Superior Court in San Francisco this week with her attorney, Philip Horne, trying to get a judge to block voter information for the ballot pamphlet that would have let people know what Prop. K will do if passed.

The view from the experts: It would be very, very bad for prostitutes and very, very good for pimps and sex traffickers.

The information Doogan sought to remove from voters included statements that Prop. K would prevent the San Francisco Police Department from seeking or accepting federal or state funds to investigate organized-crime rings that exploit trafficking victims of an identifiable race or nationality. And that it would “hobble” the district attorney and the Police Department from investigating sex trafficking.

You know, the kind of news that might prove useful if you cared about the safety dangers to women and children created by the whole sex-trafficking trade. Fortunately, most people see through such ludicrous and outrageous legislation, but not, it turns out, the new leaders of the local Democratic Party, which endorsed Prop. K and may pay a pretty price for their ideological hubris.

Judge Patrick J. Mahoney took Doogan’s arguments and pretty much tossed them into the Bay, saying the ballot arguments against Prop. K “fall well within the realm of the First Amendment,” which he added, was a “pretty persuasive” argument.

Horne argued that the proposition said nothing about pimping or prostitution. He said it only applies to “erotic services.”

When prostitution is erotic, I’ll be mayor.