Prostitution: A problem can never be solved by legalizing it

“A problem can never be solved by legalizing it,” writes Dragoș Bălinișteanu, a priest in the commune of Tomești, Iași County, in a Facebook post referring to the recent initiative to legalize prostitution.

The priest explains why:

1. Legalization does not heal the cause; it normalizes the effect

A problem almost always arises from a deeper cause (poverty, trauma, addiction, lack of meaning). Legalization addresses the outward manifestation, not the root that generated it, allowing the cause to continue unchecked. For example, a drug addict will keep using “according to the rules,” without anyone any longer striving to reach his soul.

2. What is legal implicitly becomes morally acceptable for many people

The law should have not only a coercive role, but also a formative one. When something becomes legal, the message many people receive is: “it’s no longer a problem—you can now do this whenever you want, wherever you want.” As a result, the moral threshold is lowered and the behavior spreads more easily.

3. Exposure increases, especially for the vulnerable

Legalization increases access to and visibility of a phenomenon. Those most affected are not mature and stable individuals with well-formed discernment, but young people, children, and those who are emotionally or socially fragile, who receive the signal that such behavior is “normal.”

4. Regulation means administration, not resolution

Once a phenomenon is legalized, energy is spent on organizing, taxing, and managing it. Social effort is automatically shifted from prevention and healing to maintaining the problem in a “controlled” form.

5. The state becomes complicit in the development of the problem

When taxes, licenses, and revenues appear, a moral conflict also arises: institutions end up benefiting financially from a phenomenon that, at its core, remains harmful.

6. The educational and preventive message is weakened

It is difficult to educate people against a behavior that the law validates. Prevention becomes ambiguous: “it is harmful, but permitted.”

7. History shows that legalization does not automatically reduce negative effects

In many areas (vices, addictions, risky behaviors), legalization has not led to the disappearance of the problem, but to its expansion in a form that is less socially contested.

8. It confuses freedom with the absence of limits

A healthy society does not mean eliminating limits, but responsibly assuming them—especially when the consequences affect others as well.

Evil is not healed through acceptance, but through repentance and a change of heart. The law may allow or forbid, but it cannot heal the soul. Christ did not come to redefine sin, but to heal it. He does not say that illness ceases if we give it a legal framework; rather, He calls the human person to rise up: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (cf. Matthew 9:12). The formal acceptance of a distorted order does not bring peace, but only an apparent calm that conceals the wound.

What is not acknowledged, confessed, and worked through only deepens. Evil lived out publicly and approved becomes harder to recognize, and the human person loses the sense of sin—the first step toward healing.

Where the law stops, the work of conscience and grace begins. There true change is born—change that does not merely regulate life, but transfigures it.

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