Contact: Natalie Bell, Concerned Women for America, 202-488-7000 ext. 126
WASHINGTON, March 12 /Christian Newswire/ -- Now that the initial shock is subsiding, news coverage and public reaction to Governor Eliot Spitzer's (D-New York) dalliance with a prostitute on the night before Valentine's Day has taken a strange, but predictable, turn. Today, the speculation is whether he has to resign his office and if he can avoid prosecution for breaking the law.
Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, said, "There is only muted outrage from the mainstream media that a public official betrayed the public trust and engaged in illegal (not to mention immoral) behavior. There is little indignation that he betrayed his marriage vows. Instead, there is a degree of sympathy -- certainly for his wife, but also for Mr. Spitzer's embarrassment at being caught and exposed for his involvement with a prostitute."
Crouse continued, "There were three offensive twists in the story: (1) many of the men commenting on the case in televised interviews appear to see nothing wrong with a public official being a "john" since millions of other men are; many found it rather humorous and certainly behavior to be expected of 'real' men, (2) further, almost nobody mentioned the governor's political party, and, finally, (3) the Department of Justice was apparently uninterested in prosecuting the illegal prostitution operation for – heaven forbid – mere prostitution, instead the investigation appears to be focused solely on money transfers and possible bribery."
"Experts agree that prostitution is the driving force behind sex trafficking and sex slavery," said Crouse. "While johns allegedly like Eliot Spitzer and the high-class call girls condemned to serve them flaunt the law, while the pimps get away with flagrantly advertising of commercial sexual services and while the Department of Justice typically ignores such expensive prostitution rings and devotes scant resources to routing them out, sex slavery and abusive sexual exploitation flourishes in the more typical brothels. All this as thousands of girls and women are snared by sex slavery of the grossest types."
Concerned Women for America is the nation's largest public policy women's organization.
