Hugh Esco's blog

This recounts a conversation begun in a private chat responding to a post I made on our PAC's facebook channel.  I had originally posted:

In mid-March 2021, Red Canary Song, an astroturf front group for pimps and sex-traffickers published a sign-on letter (original) advocating the decriminalization of sex-work.  Their letter was written in response to the March 16th, 2021 murder of eight Asian women who each worked at massage parlors in and around Atlanta.  The letter criticizes carceral punishment and policing as having "never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe"; and demands that "(t)he legal profession of massage work should be respected and protected by US society".  The letter attracted as co-signers hundreds of organizations, many of them explicitly associated with the Sex Workers Organizing Project, known as a company union front for the sex trafficking industry (see particularly Julie Bindel's book on the subject).  Sex-work is a term used by the pimps’ lobby and its advocates to refer to the range of those engaged in prostitution, including the mostly women and children exploited by the industry but also the managers usually understood as the pimps who traffick in the bodies of the exploited. 

Three local branches of Jewish Voices for Peace, including JVP-Atlanta (but also JVP-NYC and JVP-New Haven), joined the letter as co-signers.  And on March 18th, JVP-Atlanta published their participation with the effort on their facebook feed.