Brian Doherty highlights an important but often overlooked law:
The Brennan Center for Justice files a FOIA suit to try to get the government to acknowledge that even its own Office of Legal Counsel knew that one of its absurd demands is unconstitutional: the demand that any organization receiving federal funds related to AIDS work pledge that it has "a policy explictly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking."
In her recent book, The Wisdom Of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani describes the problem with this law thus:
The loyalty oath is based on the belief, no, the absolute conviction, that anything that improves work conditions for prostitutes serves only to bind them into slavery. The High Priestess of this view is a US academic named Donna Hughes, who pontificates on the evils of commercial sex from every available pulpit. In an op-ed piece titled 'Aiding and Abetting the Slave Trade', she railed at a programme that taught Cambodian sex workers to negotiate condom use with their clients. The programme was part of a national effort that sent new HIV infections in Cambodia crashing to fewer than 6,000 a year by 2005, from over 42,000 a decade earlier. But it was wicked.
Much more on this an other HIV-related topics in her excellent book. Her blog is here.