ANY perceptive town or city executive, sometime during his term, and especially if his fiefdom is experiencing some economic boom or the other, will always have to grapple with the reality of balancing morals with money or income.

This simply means that he has to have one eye out for veritable sources of income for his town or city and another for the finer sensibilities of his constituents.

In the current revitalized campaign against nightclubs and other areas of prostitution in Dagupan,inevitably targeting “businessmen” of the prurient and scandalous type, city officials may be catering to the better morals of the people and cause-oriented groups including the women’s sector but hurting those who fill in the city coffers or somehow boost the drawing capacity of it for tourists of all kinds.

It is easy enough as it were to enforce laws that guard public morals, as they do public health, but difficult to match this with a vibrant tourism and investment potential. One has to choose which to promote on top of the other.

Some may argue that money (or income) isn’t everything or that the love for money, as that trite saw puts it, is the root of all evil. Still money is money and revenue is revenue that can help boost a city’s capacity to deliver basic services and possibly, at some future, more appropriate time when it can already afford to, stand from a pulpit of good and moral and sublime and declare it is doing away with all that corrupts the public system.
Yes, like the lewd show clubs, motels, brothels, honky-tonks and pimp centers.

But until then, there will have to be some delicate balancing acts to do for the administrator, urban realities being what they are.
To our mind, instead of curtailing man’s (and woman’s?) basic instinct by throwing the uniformed against them and those who try to provide answer to this instinct, it is better to simply segregate or zone these so-called “red light districts” with explicit rules to govern those who patronize these establishments and maintain regular monitoring — not raids — for violations that could entail progressive rates of penalties and closure for habitual offenses.

For, come to think of it, by the very act of arresting and exposing these girls and their clients to indignities (being dragged away in their undies, getting photographed, smirked at by the raiders, etc), aren’t our moralists and enforcers precisely committing the outrage they so righteously denounce?