The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

—Abraham Lincoln

First, the only question that truly matters: Cui Bono?

What industry made ~40% of their revenues from classified listings within the last decade?

What industry has been slyly running hooker ads and profiting off prostitution for decades?

What industry has been anti-Internet from the start?

What industry has been running sensationalist, sexed-up hit-pieces scaring the public about rampant crime on Craigslist for several years?

And more importantly in the grand-scheme of things, from a level way above mere prostitution:

What hypocritical industry has been utterly incapable of understanding that the core tenet of online freedom of speech is intimately connected to the availability of online, open forums where anyone can say anything in an anonymous, online public space that is protected under the first amendment?

Newspapers.

And it's funny because no newspaper editor will ever let what I just said ever see print, as this tempest in a teapot about the world's oldest profession continues to simmer. Remember, it's an election year, so all these AGs who have been turning a blind eye to prostitution for decades now have the perfect political opportunity to play the morality police handed to them on a silver platter:

It has taken years to trend, but the MSM has slowly pumped up a moral crusade around Craigslist. Gee, isn't that convenient for them? Now they just want to hand off the ball to the state AGs. Then the AGs get to grand-stand from their corrupt moral soapboxes, which helps their political base, and the newspapers get to reclaim ~30% of Craigslist's revenue.
Ahh, the circle of Life, ain't it beautiful!

You don't see Backpage, the 2nd largest site for the exact same adult classified ads being targeted at all now do you? Who owns Backpage? Why it's the Village Voice media corp, who has deep pockets, a long history, and many friends in high places.

Craig's biggest personal mistake was not doing what Google had to do a few years ago, what Microsoft learned to do in the 90's during the antitrust trial, and what countless other tech companies insulated in their Silicon Valley tech bubble all have eventually had to do: send one hundred or more paid lobbyists to DC.

Who has been public enemy #1 of the newspapers and their media conglomerates?

Who has almost single-handedly caused the entire newspaper industry to cave in on itself in just a decade?

Craigslist

What we're seeing here is just business as usual from the Great Houses of yellow journalism.

AND NOW FOR A RANT! :)

/rant

I know a thing or two about a thing or two in this particular niche of the classified industry, since once upon a time long ago I worked a very brief & desperate stint coding at some unnamed company in the adult classified biz. It's not at all what the general public thinks it is. It's a lot more organized, practical and intentional in subtle ways most people don't realize, while the sexy, titillating parts that you see Faux News and CNN play are not nearly as exciting in reality.

I don't pass any judgment on it—it's called the oldest profession for a reason. We're all mammals after all, what's wrong with that? In fact, I think it should be completely legal, across the board, and regulated by the health industry just like in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

Too many Americans are completely stupid in their expectations about what they think would happen if it were legal. It's exactly like with America's idiotic, failed War on Some Drugs and alcohol Prohibition. Make it illegal, no it doesn't stop, since any attempt to legislate the most basic and natural of all human behaviors is futile! Prohibition only makes it worse in fact, as it just empowers organized crime to take over. Who do you think is trafficking little kids for this? Who is keeping the modern day equivalent of female slaves? Who has international shipping networks to even do those kind of logistics? Who is committing 99% of the violence in an industry of "victimless crime"? Who is tying this illegal industry to others, like drug or arms trafficking, in order to capitalize on economies of scale? Not some 12 year old girl from some Asian country. And not John Smith who has been in a sexless marriage for 20 years. And it's not Corner Pimp Moe who still lives with his mother since he just got out of jail for a petty misdemeanor. No, it's the organized criminals and corporations pulling the strings in high places in America who only exist because our gov't has setup a system of (in)justice that enables them to operate.

And a massive amount of our tax dollars are wasted in law enforcement of this industry. There's a massive opportunity cost behind it—just remember, every hooker busted and given the average penalty of a $200 ticket with no jail time is one less robber, murderer, rapist, you name it, who is caught and taken off the streets by the cops. Not to mention that the cops don't really want to enforce prohibition, since they could care less about being the morality police, and they know they have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping basic mammalian reproduction, so they are already doing it half-assed. It's kind of like the military study where they found that 60% of soldiers on the battle fields were intentionally aiming high during Vietnam to miss their human targets—such is the subconscious social fear of hurting other human beings! We need our cops to be effective and trusted by society, not the opposite! So why are we setting up a judicial system that sets the cops up for failure?

And don't even get me started on the Feminist angle on all of this. I'll just say that I know of nothing else in society than making it illegal that has done more to exploit, injure and permanently disadvantage countless innocent women than the entire legal and social apparatus setup for prohibition. Most of these women have tough lives, tough backgrounds, they have fallen through the cracks in education and our social system, and they are single moms getting by in a decimated economy. That's not exactly what I picture when I imagine criminals. But here in America we can't treat people at the bottom of our social order in a decent, Christian way. As a society, what is our solution to this so-called problem? We add another layer of victimization on these innocent women who are already victimized! America is shameful in how always treats its least well-off citizens. Yes, I blame the hypocritical religious fundies who's modus operandi is to scare folks into the pews on Sundays, and who have apparently forgotten the level of forgiveness and tolerance which Jesus himself showed to prostitutes. Ultimately it's due to America's historic, unchangeable bedrock of Puritan culture. Even though America practically invented porn, culturally, we have a completely backwards view towards human sexuality and behavior, compared to the rest of the modernized world, who laughs at us. Ooh, the answer, I know, I know, let's criminalize it!

As for the consequences of legality, no, all marriages and relationships would not be doomed as everyone switches to hookers. In fact, the opposite would probably happen: the price would drop(you have no idea how much of the money is wasted on jumping through hoops to keep safe from organized crime and Johnny Law), and the labor supply would go up a little bit. But the social stigma would remain, and this is the important part. Since humans are entirely social creatures, legalization would probably have the completely counter-intuitive effect of making relationships better across society, since if sex is made nearly valueless, rather than equivalent to what a top attorney would bill you per hour, then the social shame aspect is suddenly bumped to the top of the list of concerns. Since you don't have to worry about being associated with illegality, slavery, crime, etc. And we all know that shaming within social groups is the most effective way to alter and control human behavior—even more so than relying on prison or economics to do it. QED.