On Sept. 28, usatoday.com reported, “Justice Susan Himel of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice ruled that the laws ‘individually and together, force prostitutes to choose between their liberty interest and their right to security of the person as protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.'”

I’ll admit I was a little taken aback by this. It’s not that I didn’t know that prostitution wasn’t illegal in Canada; it’s just that I had never really thought of what it would be like to live in a place where prostitution is decriminalized on a larger scale.

Every once in a while something happens to make me think really hard about how far personal liberties should go. Being a Libertarian, my boundaries for what a person can do of their own accord extend much further than most people’s. What made me ponder the realm of personal liberty in our society is whether our level of individual accountability is up to par.

How would legalizing prostitution in this country on a large scale change things? What would happen to our society at large?

No, I’m not about to go off on a tangent about how prostitution would tear society apart at its seams, or how it would somehow turn people into animals. I’m not really into sensationalizing things. We’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t think prostitution goes on every day around us, along with a myriad of other crimes we don’t like to think about.

I just wonder about the more subtle repercussions.

If we legalized prostitution, demand for prostitutes would rise and all of the problems that go along with prostitution would be magnified.

Who sets the standards for what good working conditions are for prostitutes?

What higher authority would step in and say, “Hey, this young woman is being overworked. She clearly needs to take a break from servicing customers. The amount of men that her employer is having her sleep with now is too many.”

The higher demand for prostitutes would attract sex trafficking. You can say that having prostitution highly regulated would stop this all you want; I’m not buying it. Drugs are highly regulated, pollution emissions are regulated and alcohol is regulated, but somehow we still have problems with all of those things.

The horror stories that come with the sex trade are slightly different than someone smoking a joint, smog hanging over a city or teens buying booze underage. The end result of things going wrong during a sexual exchange is not pretty to think about. Nor is it comfortable to entertain thoughts of the kind of abuses shady business practices would entail.

I’m just not naive of what could go wrong.

I don’t think it’s hypocritical of me either, even though I am a Libertarian. Yes, when things “go wrong” with firearms, the result is not pretty, to say the least. Anyone could point out an instance where a tragedy like a school shooting took place, and say, “See, look at that. People aren’t personally accountable enough to handle owning firearms.”

The difference is the context. People will always have access to firearms, whether they are illegal or not. Will people always have access to prostitutes if they look hard enough? Yes, of course.

But we are uncomfortably aware of what can happen when things go wrong with firearms. There isn’t a placid academic discussion of what happens when someone decides to do something crazy with a weapon.

What happens when prostitution goes wrong isn’t as media friendly; it’s gritty and less sensational.

The Montreal Gazette wrote something disturbing about the dark side of the sex trade’s legalization.

“The pimps, according to the police officer, will emotionally manipulate the young women by, for instance, buying them a dog and then killing the dog as punishment for misbehaviour or poor performance. He said one prostitute was found by police with her breasts nailed sideways to a wall, in a horrifying message to other sex workers to toe the line.

“‘This isn’t the kind of happy place that these people think it is,’ he said with a cynical nod to the marauding tourists.”

That’s an unsavory image, isn’t it?

The step necessary to assure that atrocities like that didn’t happen in our society — terrible things happening to prostitutes while the masses walked around oblivious — would be paramount to a total paradigm change concerning most people’s accountability.

The attitude of “It’s not happening to me, so I don’t care,” would have to disappear. The idea that it’s OK for employers to take advantage of the economic situations of their employees would have to disappear.

The real question is, “Can we handle it?” Because if we can’t handle stepping up as a society to make sure prostitutes aren’t mistreated and sex trafficking doesn’t step in to make big bucks, then we just can’t handle it.

Does this mean I think there are limits to a person’s liberties? Absolutely not. It means I don’t think our society holds itself accountable for what it does right now. I’m not interested in seeing what happens when we throw thousands of hookers into the mix.