Another Flip-Flop? Harris Mum on Past Support for Decriminalizing Prostitution

Vice President Kamala Harris won't say whether she is still committed to decriminalizing sex work, a stance she embraced during her 2020 presidential campaign, Axios reported Tuesday.

Harris’s campaign did not respond this week to Axios’s inquiry about her position on prostitution and declined to make Harris available for a brief interview. In 2019, when asked whether she thought "sex work ought to be decriminalized," Harris replied, "I think so, I do," adding that "we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed."

Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has walked back a number of her past positions, such as giving two million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship, passing Medicare for All, and banning fracking. Harris last month vowed to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars toward building a border wall, which she once derided as "un-American" and "a complete waste of taxpayer money [that] won't make us any safer."

Former president Donald Trump, Harris's Republican opponent, told an interviewer last month that Harris is "flip-flopping on everything that she's believed in for the last 20 years."

During her 2020 White House bid, Harris said she supported decriminalizing prostitution, pointing to her record as San Francisco’s district attorney. "I was advocating then that we need to stop arresting these prostitutes and instead go after the Johns and the pimps, because we were criminalizing the women," Harris said.

In 2008, however, as district attorney, Harris opposed a San Francisco ballot initiative to decriminalize sex work, calling the initiative "completely ridiculous" and arguing that it "would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco."

The Harris campaign declined to answer Axios’s inquiry about the inconsistency.

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