What's to say about Eliot Spitzer? If (a) he weren't married, and (b) he hadn't made an issue of cracking down on prostitution services, then I'd say it's nobody's business. But given his mendacity and hypocrisy, that's not the case.

The Washington Examiner does a nice job of comparing Spitzer's imbroglio with other politics and prostitution scandals, which highlights the extent to which prostitution stings have become a favored device in the politics of personal destruction toolkit.

That's another reason why (and again, leaving aside Spitzer's mendacity and hypocrisy), making the purchasing of sexual pleasure illegal opens the door to selective prosecutions and other bad things. Regulate it as might be necessary for health and safety, zone it away from the kiddies, and tax it like other businesses, says I.

The arrangements for the rendezvous at a Washington hotel were caught on a federal wiretap recording last month and laid out in legal papers that reveal the intricacies involved in hiring a $1,200-an-hour call girl and sending her to D.C. from New York.

How nice that the FBI has nothing better to do than elaborate surveillance operations aimed at prosecuting consensual, commercial relations involving adults. What's terrorism, after all, compared to illicit nookie?

You know, if you're a porn director starring in your own films, you can pay a professional to have sex with you and as long as you film it for commercial sale it's all (still, thankfully) legal, despite the efforts of the Meese Commission. How inane does that make our prostitution laws look?

More. Andrew Sullivan picks up on the same theme.

More still.

Client #9, also known as Eliot Spitzer, enthusiastically enlisted in a crusade for tougher anti-prostitution laws and specifically for steps to raise the penalties for "johns" who patronized the women involved. The campaign bore fruit, and in his first months as Governor signed into law what advocates call "the toughest and most comprehensive anti-sex-trade law in the nation". Among other provisions, the law "lays the groundwork for a more aggressive crackdown on demand, by increasing the penalty for patronizing a prostitute, a misdemeanor, to up to a year in jail, from a maximum of three months." (Nina Bernstein, "Foes of Sex Trade Are Stung by the Fall of an Ally", New York Times, Mar. 12). (via Overlawyered.com)

And reader "Avee" comments:

Yes, the FBI may have initially been following a suspicious money transfer in Spitzer's private accounts. But once it became clear this wasn't about corruption or terrorism, but purchasing commercial sex, they continued with the wiretaps and surveillance. So Steve still has a point about the FBI misdirecting its resources at prostitution.

Furthermore. Alan Dershowitz agrees it was entrapment:

Once federal authorities concluded that the "suspicious financial transactions" attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It's simply none of the federal government's business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes.

As [the Wall Street Journal] has reported: "It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . ."

And Nora Ephron observes:

This is the problem these guys get into: they're so morally rigid and puritanical in real life (and on some level, so responsible for this priggish world we now live in) that when they get caught committing victimless crimes, everyone thinks they should be punished for sheer hypocrisy.

But they shouldn't really. It's one of the things you have to admire about Senator Larry Craig: he's still there.

Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (based in New Orleans) became the first and only jurisdiction in the country to recognize an individual's right to bear both arms (in a 2001 case) and to purchase adult toys "designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs." The latter case involved a Texas statute that criminalized the promotion and sale of sex toys. As the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro explained:

"The Fifth Circuit's analysis correctly rests on the Supreme Court's 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, which found that Texas's anti-homosexual sodomy statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment right to engage in private intimate conduct. Put simply, there is no state interest compelling enough to overcome the individual right to freedom in the bedroom.

Because the 11th Circuit last year upheld a similar Alabama "obscene device" statute, Shapiro says that "the Fifth Circuit's decision now squarely opens up a 'circuit split,' which means the issue is ripe for the Court to take up next term." Here's hoping the highest court in the land follows the Fifth Circuit and decides that adults are entitled to possess both handguns in the home (in a case now before the Supreme Court) and sex toys.

And here's another look at how liberty and sexuality stand together. Jamie Kirchick writes in the New Republic of how gay porn actor and director Michael Lucas, who is a Jewish Russian immigrant, has run afoul of the politically correct academic crowd because of his unbridled condemnation of homophobia and anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. This particularly brouhaha erupted after Stanford University's student government asked Lucas to host a lecture on sexual health, which caused other students to protests against the invite. Responded Lucas, "It totally escapes me how gay people can side with burqa-wearing, jihad-screaming, Koran-crazed Muslims."

Kirchick admits that Lucas is often over the top (forgive me), but I like this quote from the story:

"He's from the East Coast," says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. "Us people on the West Coast are more laid back."

More on gun rights. The Pink Pistols' brief is the lead for the Washington Post story on amicus briefs in the Second Amendment case now before the Court. (IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter helped write the brief.)

More on Jew-bashing + gay-bashing. The most recent in an ongoing series of attacks in France.

Europe capitulates, again. A gay Iranian teenager faces deportation from Britain and execution in his home country after a Dutch court refused to hear his asylum claim.

Commenting on this week's oral arguments in the marriage case before the California Supreme Court, Dale Carpenter writes:

if gay-marriage litigants do lose the case, the loss may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the gay-marriage movement as a whole. On the one hand, a pro-SSM ruling from the California high court would lead to a state-wide voter initiative to amend the state constitution to ban not only gay marriage but legislatively created civil unions as well. Nobody knows how that vote would turn out, but I would not be confident of a victory for gay marriage. That has always been a serious risk of this California litigation.

On the other hand, a ruling that leaves the issue to the state legislature (which has twice voted to recognize gay marriage) and the governor (who has twice vetoed gay-marriage legislation, deferring the issue to this litigation) will mean that this issue will be resolved democratically.

We've been through this before: either you believe that gay marriage is a new civil right that should be enforced by the courts, or you believe that (with the sole exception of uber-liberal Massachusetts) it's counter-productive to achieve a court victory that creates a voter backlash, enshrining a ban on legal recognition of gay unions into state constitutions. It then follows that giving the electorate a few years to get comfortable with civil unions is the best path to securing eventual marriage equality.

Quite unrelatedly, the Washington Post looks at Hillary's gay supporters in Texas, some of whom find Obama's lack of actual experience troubling.

On the other hand:

[Clinton supporter] Gribben, 64, gives a short history lesson and names all of Clinton's contributions to the gay community. She was the first first lady to march in a gay pride parade. She's fought for more HIV funds. She wants to repeal "don't ask, don't tell," though it was her husband who signed the controversial military policy toward gays. She's for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and supports civil unions.

To which could also be added, "although her husband signed the Defense of Marriage Act (and bragged about it in his re-election ads on radio in the South)."

The Cato Institute's David Boaz, author of The Politics of Freedom, looks at the legacy of William F. Buckley, the founder of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement "dedicated to individual liberty, limited government, the U.S. Constitution, federalism, the free-market economy and a strong national defense." But, as Boaz writes:

The conservative intellectual movement abandoned its limited-government roots. The neoconservatives, who drifted over from the radical left, brought their commitment to an expansive government intimately involved in shaping the social and economic life of the nation.... The religious right demanded that government impose their social values on the whole country.

These are among the contradictions that confront conservatism today-and "liberalism" has its own fair share, with dedication to civil liberties clashing against its support for expansive government in all its guises, including stifling economic regulation, high taxes, mandated group-based preferences, and (increasingly) counter-productive trade tariffs, along with blocking school choice.

The world is full of grays, and Buckley's religious and generational-based opposition to gay legal equality has to be tempered with his laudable opposition to the expansion of communist totalitarianism around the globe and moves toward socialism in the U.S. It remains for today's defenders of liberty to forge a coherent politics that brings together economic and personal freedom, both at home and abroad.

More. In another recent post, Boaz asks why conservatives now support laws against discrimination based on some characteristics (e.g., race, religion) but not based on others (e.g., sexual orientation). Not so surprisingly, turns out "It's not a matter of logical categories."

This is a bit inside-the-beltway, but the fact that the very socially conservative (oh, let's just say reactionary) Washington Times is abandoning some of its most egregious anti-gay stylings (using "homosexual" instead of gay; placing scare quotes around the "m" word in "homosexual 'marriage'") signifies something.

Real advances for gay legal and social equality come not just when the convention-abandoning left "progressives" move on (sometimes to positive effect, sometimes destructively and hubristically), but when the hidebound, clinging-to-tradition, puttin'-on-the-brakes other leg of the national psyche advances, albeit much more slowly, in the forward direction. That's why while the Democratic nominees clearly far outpace the GOP on matters gay (at least rhetorically), the fact that McCain is somewhat of an improvement over Bush (i.e., as when he called the proposed federal anti-gay marriage amendment "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans") still registers as important.

More. Scott Tucker, communications director for the Log Cabin Republicans, makes the case that if you happen to be gay and Republican, you can feel comfortable voting for John McCain.

Furthermore. Jonathan Rauch shares his thoughts in For The GOP, A Tonic Named McCain.

Say goodnight to Chuck Rosenthal, who recently quit as district attorney of Texas's Harris County (that's greater Houston). This is the guy who brought the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case and then, insisting on arguing it himself before the Supreme Court, bungled it-producing a famous victory for gay civil rights.

We can thank him for helping gays make another point, too. Rosenthal's problems stemmed from "romantic, pornographic, and racist emails found on his county computer," as one report said. And what legal precedent did Rosenthal cite as he tried to prevent exposure of those emails? Right, Lawrence v. Texas, which he said protected his privacy. I'm not making that up.

It's hard to imagine a better demonstration that civil rights for one are civil rights for all.