But that's always been a straw man. There are tons of non profits that just assume this to get on with their moralist agenda. All the organizations actually involved with current or former sex workers strongly rebut this non-truth.
The history of vice criminalization is also informative.
- Prohibition was anti-irish, and anti-immigrant in general. KKK resurgence in the 1920s involved in part them being anti-alcohol vigilantes too.
- Original criminalization of cannabis after in the 1930s to not abolish the prohibition bureaucracy saw Mexicans as expendable scapegoats. This is why there is little use of "marijuana" in English before this time.
- Current drug war initiated in conjunction with the "southern strategy".
Now I think a lot of the bad morality is genuinely held, just as there were probably non-nativist teetotalers a century ago. But the clear negative structural consequence of anti-sex-work is to continue to try to keep the public sphere and less shitty parts of the formal economy male-dominated.
>>Prohibition was anti-irish, and anti-immigrant in general. KKK resurgence in the 1920s involved in part them being anti-alcohol vigilantes too.
Is that true? From my understanding, Prohibition on a national scale was championed by women's movements and temperance activists (Susan B Anthony was a leader of both) as states across the entire country were enacting these laws on there own. If the KKK was involved, that wouldn't explain why Massachusetts and Maine were among the first to initiate such laws.
Google "KKK and prohibition" and see some stuff. The extent extent of collaboration is evidentally debated re https://www.jstor.org/stable/25144510?seq=1v, but certainly there was alignment.
Certainly the KKK couldn't have been the earliest to push prohibition. It's important to remember that the 1880s and 1920s KKK were almost separate organizations: the original largely disbanded because "mission accomplished", with the end of reconstruction and imposition of Jim Crow. The 1920s iteration was a much more national organization kicked off by "The Birth of a Nation". This was also the peak of Social Darwinism, and racism being not only acceptable but fashionable among northern intellectuals.
So the new KKK couldn't help but be late to the temperance party, but it fit in with the overall milieu. A gentile KKK fashionable to northern and southern elites is rather separate from the low-class Appalachian moonshiners and bootleggers whose descendants we stereotype as the most angrily racist today.
