Lawyer: Rentboy Raid A National Disgrace
The below opinion in response to the raid and arrest of seven Rentboy employees comes from Florida-based attorney and South Florida Gay News publisher Norm Kent.
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Rentboy ‘Raid’ A National Disgrace
By Norm Kent
Today, there should be unified national outrage.
Less than a week after ISIS beheaded an archaeologist in Syria, Homeland Security has beheaded Rentboy.com in New York.
This is from the ‘you can’t make this up department.’ Really.
In closing down Rentboy’s New York office, federal agents were deployed from the offices of Homeland Security.
Is that why we mobilized a federal agency to combat international terrorism? To use those ass-ets to targets boy’s ass-es? Our nation, our government, those prosecutors should be so ashamed of themselves. It is unconscionable, unbelievable, and almost surreal.
Seven years ago, banks all over this country conspired to virtually bring the nation to a financial standstill, defrauding consumers, robbing lenders, destroying your credit, foreclosing your mortgages and robbing you blind. Stocks collapsed, careers were lost, and portfolios were ruined. Everywhere you turned, people lost their wealth and standing. Barely a soul was prosecuted.
But the largest gay website in the world, with over 10,000 men plying their trade, gets popped, and seven people are already in jail. This, my friends, is why governments everywhere are held in disgust.
Ultimately, legalizing the sex trade for adults is the next step in everyone’s civil rights struggle. You see, it’s all about free choice. While you may find prostitution morally objectionable, the fact that it offends your sensibilities is insufficient to deny that right to another party. Legalizing the sex trade means respecting the free choice people have to make their own moral decisions without interference by another agency.
Some people want to buy couches; other people cocks. Deal with it. The matter is not for you to judge. Adult men seeking masseurs and escorts should have that unfettered right. Rentboy.com provided the Internet a vehicle wherein consenting adults made free choices.
While the site has disclaimers stating that the advertisements are for companionship and not sexual services, prosecutors say Rentboy.com is designed primarily for advertising illegal prostitution.
“As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this Internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution,” acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Kelly Currie said in a statement.
The agent from Homeland Security jumped in and said it was part of a “global criminal enterprise.” Really? Jeffrey Hurant, who runs Rentboy, is being accused by the Department of Homeland Security. Really—is this why we gave this agency a job, a badge, and a gun?
With more than 20,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and nearly 11,000 men listed as contractors, you have to wonder what the Department of Homeland Security is going to do with the cartons and boxes of data they carried out of the Rent Boy offices.
Think about the absurdity of this. It’s beyond imagination. While terrorists are arming themselves with AK47’s to hijack an Amtrak train heading from New York City to Albany, some Homeland Security Agent is going to be contacting a kid name Dante in Fort Lauderdale to ask him whether Andre in Chicago had a happy ending to his massage.
Look, Rentboy may be the world’s largest gay prostitution site ever. I don’t know, but I do know that male prostitution is not the greatest threat to Homeland Security.
I do know that if we are utilizing the assets of our Department of Homeland Security to target a consensual adult hookup site that the people who so authorized this investigation should be hooked up and strung by their genitals to the nearest light pole.
I do know that we live in a world where terrorists bred in South Florida flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center. I know things have not got better since then, not with citizens everywhere being threatened with brutal massacres by terrorists anywhere.
I know that the National Security Agency should not be monitoring your twitter account, and that Homeland Security should not be worried about a gay adult escort site.
If there is a story here, it is not about gay men seeking hookups. It is about a national security agency so misdirecting its energies, efforts, and equipment that we should all be astonished and appalled.
