An op-ed by John R. Miller, former State Department ambassador at large on modern slavery, in the New York Times tells a strange tale of the struggle between State and Justice that stymied efforts to stop the sex slave trade.

While many of my brethren in the practical blawgosphere have advocated for the treatment of prostitution as a victimless crime that should not be a crime at all, I doubt that any would have thought that the Department of Justice was one of their biggest supporters.  But according to Miller, that’s exactly what was happening behind the scenes.

From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts.

Miller then runs through a series of rhetorical questions, the point of which is to show the harms that this bill was designed to address, and concludes that the Justice Department’s attitude was that it did not want to cure the disease of sex slavery.   Of course, it is impossible to know from Miller’s description whether the law would have far exceeded his view of the cure, but assuming that it was sufficiently surgical to have had the effect he claims, why would Justice be so antagonistic?

A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.

As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.

This is where one begins to get an inkling that all is not as Miller suggests.  As soon as he raised the dreaded ACLU to smear his enemies, Miller gives away the high ground in fit of Rovian pique. 

The problem Miller raises, that an international sex slave trade exists and subjugates the poor and desperate, both male and female, is a real one, and one that should disgust Americans.  But Miller’s argument, framed by vague rhetoric coupled with his slash and burn attack on his opponents, suggests that this was a real problem addressed by an overbroad, overreaching law that presented huge potential for abuse and problems. 

Let’s face facts:  For the Justice Department to join the ACLU in a big group hug means that this law must have been just horrific.  Justice loves all laws that empower them and criminalize behaviors Americans enjoy.  This one must have been so far over the top that it would even make Ashcroft and Gonzalez blush.

But the fact that Miller is pimping for bad law doesn’t mean that the sex slave trade isn’t real, and isn’t a terrible problem that should be addressed.  This is a very different issue than the one my brethren have been talking about, with consenting adults engaged in an occupation of choice.  This is the one of 14 year old children sold to slave masters for lives of misery and abuse.  I can’t imagine that appropriate law, and a meaningful approach, can’t be devised to deal with it, without sweeping in a multitude of other “sins”.

But if Miller couldn’t even get Justice to go along with his “solution”, it’s hard to imagine just how bad it must have been.