Soothsaying for financial gain should be outlawed

To start off with, I would like to say that I cannot prove that some psychic mediums cannot tell the future any more than I can prove that God, Allah, Buddha, Shiva and all the countless other deities that humans believe in don't exist. All I know is that they can't all exist and be all-powerful and the likelihood is none of them exist. This brings me to my opponent's point about making preaching with menaces illegal. I've seen this on television in Texas – some frothing evangelist comes on and starts ranting on about us all being sinners and telling us that the only way to redeem ourselves is to call the number on the bottom the screen with our credit card details to hand. To my mind, that sort of thing should be outlawed as well but freedom of religion is enshrined in constitutional law (at least in America), which is why I didn't add preachers to my list of soothsayers. By the way, I don't know why soothsayers' victims are mostly women, but they are. If you don't believe me, go to the newsagents and look at the magazines aimed at women (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Idle Chit-Chat Weekly, etc. ) and see how many of them have astrology pages. Then look at the magazines aimed at men (Car and Driver, Viz, GQ, etc. ) and see how many astrology pages there are in them. I bet you will find far more psychic mumbo-jumbo in the women's journals than in the men's. Similarly, take a look at the testimonies on this psychic readings website: . http://www.psychicreadings.org.uk... You will find that they are all from women except one, which is from a certain Mr. C who wrote: "Dear Luke, You are simply amazing and the best, in fact I would go so far as to say you are wonderful and fantastic. You really are! It is my profound wish that one day we could meet as I would love to take my belief in all things spiritual further. Perhaps one day my wish will come true. I would love to buy you a meal in Manchester as my way of saying thank you properly for all you have done for me. Luke, thank you so much, I appreciate all that you do for me and I am very grateful. With warmest wishes, Mr C" I don't know how that reads to you, but to me it sounds like Mr. C is asking Luke out on a date. So although Mr. C may not, biologically speaking, be female he obviously is very effeminate. Moving on, of course, I accept that not all women who get ripped-off by supernatural spivs are wasting their husband's money - some may still be single and are chucking their fathers' money down the drain, others might even have jobs and be squandering their own cash, who knows? Whatever, the point is that these fraudsters are targeting those women who have more money than sense and that is morally wrong, even though it may not yet be illegal. Look at this way, if an entire industry was based on conmen diddling pensioners out of their savings or fraudsters jewing the handicapped out of their disability benefits, laws would be introduced to protect these vulnerable people and I fail to see why weak-minded women don't deserve the same protection. In conclusion, these mercenary mediums are exploiting people's mothers, wives and daughters and their actions will have an adverse affect on their whole families' finances. This means the entire household has to suffer to satisfy these unscrupulous spiritualists' avarice and greed, and that is why soothsaying for financial gain should be outlawed. Thank you.