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All in all, police in the U.S. make about 100,000 arrests a year for prostitution. Anything resembling an exact figure is obviously impossible to get, but estimates on the total of full-time professional prostitutes in the U.S. run as high as 500,000, and reports indicate that the number seems to stay fairly constant in relation to the population. The most comprehensive if not the most trust-inspiring figures originated with the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who reported back in 1948 that 69% of the men he interviewed had visited a prostitute at least once, and that 15% to 20% did so several times a year. From this, one team of investigators has boldly inferred a grand total of 315 million episodes of commercial sex per year, for a collective payment of $2.25 billion.
Despite such evidence of vast private support, prostitution is illegal in every state except Nevada. An effort to legalize it in California last month died in the state legislature. But when laws are so widely broken, it seems reasonable to ask whether the laws should not be changed. It was not so long ago, after all, that placing a bet and buying a drink were punishable as crimes, yet now the Government generally accepts such behavior and even sponsors it, via state liquor stores and lotteries. As to prostitution, then, may we not rely on the good sense of St. Thomas Aquinas? "Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace," he said. "Do away with the cesspool, and the palace will become an unclean and stinking place."
Even in our permissive society, many people would reply that prostitution is not like the other vices. The familiar objections are social (it spreads crime and disease), paternalistic (it corrupts youth) or aesthetic (it befouls whole districts with its invitations to debauchery). But the most fundamental objection is simply that—St. Thomas or no St. Thomas—prostitution is immoral. The Bible says so quite clearly and condemns it emphatically. Of the countless reformers who tried to do something about the Christian injunction that lust is a primary tool of the devil, King Louis IX of France may be taken as archetypal. Before setting out on a Crusade to Palestine, he ordered all brothels closed. Many of the prostitutes simply joined the Crusade, serving as camp followers on the way to the Holy Land.
Thus ever after. The Catholic Church more or less came to accept the idea of sin as inevitable until the Protestant Reformation once again demanded ruthless punishments. Another crusade, this one in the American West and aimed at the new Holy Land of the frontier, drew its camp followers just as surely. The sporting house and the saloon became the social centers of many an outpost and booming new metropolis from the Alleghenies to the Yukon; most splendid of them all was the famous Everleigh Club, a 50-room mansion in Chicago, where for $50 a night minimum, guests were regaled with champagne from golden buckets and fountains gushed perfume at regular intervals.