I assume some of you may, unfortunately, be familiar with the feeling people can experience when there's a party coming up at the office hosted by some friends of yours who traditionally include you in all their activities, but no invitation has arrived with your name on it. Was this just some type of accidental oversight? Did something get lost in the mail? Or has there been a rift opening up in the relationship without you noticing it? That must be how American prostitutes and other sex workers were feeling after the Democrats released their latest campaign platform. In 2020, the party's platform prominently included a vow to "protect the lives of sex workers," but in the 2024 edition, that language mysteriously vanished. And some of the sex workers in question claim that they are "terrified." (Newsweek)

The 2024 democratic platform leaves out millions of Americans who were included just four years ago.

The 2020 platform included a commitment to "protect the lives of sex workers," recognizing the heightened risks, particularly for women of color and people who are transgender. In 2024, the supportive language was removed.

"We don't have a way to know if we will be safe. Personally, I'm absolutely terrified of what the future looks like," Electra Rayne, the founder of QueerCrush, told Newsweek. "Harris's campaign is positing itself as super progressive...and then they completely eliminated the one mention we had. It's really startling. It's really alarming. It's really concerning."

Newsweek interviewed one activist and advocate for the rights of sex workers named Electra Rayne. She (he? Who knows?) is the founder of "QueerCrush" and describes her/himself as "a leading advocate for authentic queer passion and sex worker rights." Some of these advocates are already blaming Kamala Harris for this, saying that she wants to portray herself as being "super progressive" but then she turns around and cuts them out of the conversation. They also note how, as District Attorney in California, Harris prosecuted many sex workers and shut down Backpage.com, cutting off the income stream of many sex workers.

The first thing to figure out here is whether this was a deliberate change in policy by the DNC or simply an oversight. They had to rush through the party platform in record time after Biden dropped out and they were scrambling to name an official replacement. They even forgot to remove several references to "Joe Biden's second term" in the document, so perhaps it simply slipped through the cracks. But wouldn't they have taken the 2020 platform as a template and simply modified it to suit the current cycle?

Still, there's a reasonable argument to be made that this elimination of the language about protecting sex workers was deliberate. The reality is that the conditions on the ground have changed significantly since 2020 and a lot of people aren't feeling as tolerant toward prostitution and other sex work as they may have previously. This has largely been driven - at least in part - by the Biden/Harris border crisis. We have no way of knowing how many women and young girls have been sex trafficked across the border and it's now a common sight to see them "marketing their wares" in our nation's cities. The transmission of STDs, which had finally started dropping significantly in the 2000s thanks to aggressive social work and educational efforts, has risen steeply with the arrival of all of these new "workers." Instances of syphilis have increased by 80% in the past few years. 

This negative attitude is showing up in the polls and in our courts. The residents of the very liberal city of San Francisco recently sued the municipal government over its failure to control what they described as "a rampant prostitution problem." Residents of New York City have been raising similar alarms. This issue polls particularly poorly among women who do not work in the sex trade because all of this easy (and cheap) access to foreign prostitutes may prove too great of a temptation to some of the men in the community. People have gotten a fresh look at the fruits of this "sex work" now and most don't like what they see. The Democrats are probably not anxious to officially tie that albatross around their necks. Can you really blame them?