Should prostitution be legalized in the United States

I accept your challenge and am excited to debate with you. To begin, I would like to make a few definitions: -Prostitution: The act of having sex in exchange for money -Moral: considered right or good by most people -Safe: not involving or likely to involve danger, harm, or loss. I will negate the resolution that prostitution should be legalized across the United States. My first contention is the relation between drugs and prostitution. Prostitution and drugs have two main relations. One relation is the dependency of prostitution to continue drug habits. The second is the cause of prostitution on the drug industry. Both are equally catastrophic. In regards to the first relation, one of the main reasons that women get into the prostitution industry is to support drug addictions. It is estimated that 55% of women prostitutes were drug addicts before becoming prostitutes. Legalizing prostitution would make this avenue an obvious choice for drug addicts looking for more money to support their habits. In regards to the second relation, 30% of women involved in a study of street prostitution stated that they got involved in drugs after getting in the business (psychologists believe this is to cope with the trauma involved with prostitution). 15% of the women in the same study said that they became prostitutes and started using recreational drugs at the same time. My second contention is the spread of STD"s. STD"s, also known as sexually transmitted diseases, are the cause of millions of deaths worldwide yearly. In the year 2006, 2.9 million people died from STD"s. STD"s are most common in prostitutes and people involved in the sex industry. This is a clear reason why legalization of prostitution would be dangerous and detrimental to society because it would increase the spread of STD"s across the United States. My third contention is domestic violence. In a study of adult prostitutes, it was reported that 82% of them had been physically assaulted. 83% had been threatened with a weapon. 68% had been raped while working as a prostitute. Another study reported that 50% of prostitutes reported that they were being kidnapped by pimps; 76% were beaten by pimps; and 79% were beaten by customers. To finish the statistics of physical abuse on prostitutes, one final study reported that 15% of all suicide victims are prostitutes and 75% of prostitutes attempted suicide. If these obvious, blatant statistics are not extremely clear reasons to why legalization of prostitution would not be beneficial to anyone, then I feel my opponent values sexual desires over the overall safety of people. I will now refute my opponent"s points, although they were not clearly defined. Since he did not give a clear distinction of contentions, I will take some main points that I was able to draw from it and I will refute them. 1.Prostitution is not immoral. Even if it were immoral on a personal level, it should not dictate the entire country"s decision. 2.Legalizing prostitution would decrease the amount of trafficking from other countries. In regards to my opponent"s first contention. Let me refer you to the beginning of my argument when I clarified the definition of moral. Moral is determined by the general population. My opponent used the example of interracial marriage. He stated that if a person believed that interracial marriage was immoral, then it should not dictate the country"s decision. Well, to refute that point, I would like to direct my opponent to look up the 1967 court case Loving v Virginia. That was the first time interracial marriage was made federally legal. Now one may ask, if opinions don"t matter, then why was it ever illegal? The answer to that question is simple. Prior to 1967, interracial marriage was not acceptable and considered immoral. After civil rights movements, people started realizing that interracial marriage was not only acceptable, but also moral. Laws can be made based of morality since morality is based on the opinion of the general population. On the same note, prostitution is not moral because the general population considers it wrong. In regards to my second point. The resolution of the debate is talking about legalization of prostitution in the United States. Let me repeat, in the United States. So trafficking in other countries should be disregarded. So the only thing we can discuss is prostitution in the United States. I believe that my opponent was trying to imply that prostitutes get trafficked into the United States. I think my opponent is confusing prostitution with the sex slave industry. As well, it is very difficult to illegally smuggle anyone into the United States, so unless my opponent can provide statistics about the illegal importing of human beings for prostitution, then I believe the voters can disregard this point.