But it still eclipses other sex-trade ad outlets such as The Stranger's and the formerly notorious Craigslist no recent prostitution cases stemming from their ads proved to involve juveniles. That number isn't huge - about 18 in 2010, out of 81 total documented cases - or, apparently, growing: just four in the first half of this year. McGinn based his complaint on reports from the Seattle Police that ads figured in a number of its investigations of underage prostitution. They have escalated the demands on far beyond what McGinn demanded, in a way that could come back to bite various local media - including The Stranger. Read closely and you’ll see that they have broadened the crusade to target not just underage exploitation, but sex ads generally. Their five-page letter reads like a list of pretrial discovery requests, and McKenna and company brandish the threat of a legal crackdown by noting that they’re sending it “in lieu of a subpoena.” It echoes McGinn's complaint, with a difference. Last week, McKenna, the president of the unfortunately acronymed NAAG (National Association of Attorneys General), led 45 other states’ AGs in delivering an even louder barrage against VVM. In July, McGinn shot a public broadside at VVM, denouncing Backpage’s “adult” ads as a prime medium for trafficking underage sex slaves.
The object of McGinn’s, and now McKenna’s, outrage is, the popular classified ad site of Village Voice Media, which publishes The Stranger’s rival Seattle Weekly and other alternative weeklies. On Wednesday, Washington’s leading Boy Scout, gay-marriage-bashing Republican attorney general Rob McKenna, lined up with a very different politician, Mayor Mike McGinn, and implicitly with The Stranger, the ideological equivalent of antimatter, in stout opposition to, of all things, a classified advertising website. This has got to be one of the weirdest political ménage à trois since Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin settled the world’s fate at Yalta.
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