Slippery Slope

When dealing with social issues, sometimes it is not prudent to focus just on the issue at hand, but on where it will go from there.

For example, gay marriage. For a while, Yeshiva University defended itself in a case in which a student wanted to live on campus housing with her (I think non-student) lesbian partner. YU presumably felt (though did not make the case) that accomodating this living arrangement, which was contrary to Jewish law, would not be ethically (or religiously) right. YU could not discriminate, receiving federal funds. But they claimed that they could not let them live together in student housing since it was their policy not to let non-married couples live together on student housing, be they straight or gay. It is New York's fault for not recognizing gay marriage. The counter-claim : the university's policy was still discriminatory in its effect, since homosexual couples were not able to marry and thus get housing.

It is interesting how various federal policies, which are not supposed to affect free practice of religion (see the constitution), end up hindering it.

At any rate, recognizing gay marriage is not just an issue of giving equal civil rights of marriage to all, but also carries with it other consequences which are either not recognized by their proponents are not stressed. This is not to say that certain policies should not be pursued, but one should be aware of all the possible consequences which could, and given the current legal system, will come up.

I saw a good example of this today on little green footballs, in a post titled German Government Wears Pimp Hat. The govt. legalized prostitution (and declared it not immoral) two years ago, and a result, they are trying to force an unemployed woman into prostitution.

As radical Islam continues to send out roots in Europe, Germany’s social welfare system plumbs the depths of absurdity: ‘If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits’.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners — who must pay tax and employee health insurance — were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job — including in the sex industry — or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

“There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry,” said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. “The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.”

Update: Snopes lists this as undetermined and likely to have come from a mistranslation of a German article that presented it as a hypothetical, rather than concrete case.