Opinion: Lawmakers consider weighty issues: sex tax in Nevada and ‘Northern scum’ in Maryland

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While Congress is worrying about how to save Wall Street (and Detroit and PUT YOUR CAUSE HERE), lawmakers in Nevada and Maryland are taking on attention-grabbing issues. Let’s start with Nevada.

A legislative committee killed a proposal that would have imposed a $5 state sales tax on the services of prostitutes working in legal brothels. Interestingly, some of the biggest supporters of the tax were brothel owners themselves, who viewed the tax as a way of gaining respectability -- as a way to contribute to the commonweal, so to speak. It was estimated that the tax would bring in $2 million a year to Nevada’s depleted coffers.

As our colleague Ashley Powers reported from Carson City, lawmakers heard from brothel owners and sex workers at a hearing on the bill Tuesday. Deanne Salinger, who works at the BunnyRanch as “Air Force Amy,” said, “If $5 a person can raise $2 million a year, I’m all for it.”

But by Thursday, the bill had died in committee.

Meanwhile, in Maryland some lawmakers plan to revisit a touchy issue -- whether to replace the state song, the warlike ‘Maryland, My Maryland.’ As the Baltimore Sun reports, a previous effort to scrap the song was squashed. The song, set to a Civil War-era poem, is a reminder of the Southern sympathies many Marylanders held in the 1860s. Here’s an arresting stanza:

I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The Old Line’s bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb --
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
Just drips with nostalgia for the old days, doesn’t it?

-- Steve Padilla

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