PRACTICALLY DUTCH IN THE HEART OF SIN CITY

Amsterdam - When a Belgian politician called the Netherlands a "cesspool
of sin" in 2005, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot knew that his country
could no longer be blase about its libertine reputation. Not when its
southern neighbor, usually the subject of many barbed jokes here, was
laying claim to the moral high ground.

So Mr. Bot gathered his ambassadors around him and told them to go
forth and counter the "foreign press caricatures" of the Netherlands.
That's a tough job when the facts paint a rather bizarre picture.

Holland has legalized prostitution and euthanasia, and it tolerates
the use of soft drugs. The state makes sure that children as young as
12 receive sex education, and contraceptives if they want them. Little
wonder that two years after Mr. Bot's softer-image offensive, the
stereotype of the average Dutchman is still that of a pot-smoking dude
who visits an underage prostitute just before pulling the plug on his
mother's life-support machine. Having recently moved to the capital of
this "cesspool," I've seen a very different picture.

The Dutch don't strike me as a bunch of post-moral, ultra-liberal
hedonists.

On the contrary, they're rather ordinary, even conservative,
folks.

The Netherlands is a country where people wash their cars on weekends
and lovingly place garden gnomes in their flower beds. How immoral or
uninhibited can a society be where not one but three Christian parties
vie for votes and a popular proverb, basically the national motto,
translates as "Act normal, that's crazy enough." Acting "normal"
doesn't include indulging in any of the legalized vices, either.

The society that taxes away extreme disparities in wealth also frowns
on extreme behavior. To unmask the Dutch conformist behind that
anything-goes facade, I recently explored Amsterdam's notorious Red
Light district at night. "Yeah, sure," some readers might be thinking
now. But let me reassure them (and my fiancee) that this was a
legitimate, journalistic assignment: penetrating the heart of sin city
for evidence of Dutch guilt, or -- as it turned out -- innocence. My
gaze (seriously, honey) never fell on the women displaying themselves
in the windows and focused solely on the other passersby.

My experience seemed to confirm what locals had repeatedly told me:
Ordinary Dutchmen might visit the bars and restaurants in this
neighborhood, but they are not the ones thronging the narrow alleyways
to look for sexual gratification. I heard many languages spoken as I
strolled the reddish gloom but rarely any Dutch (and a stray local on
the prowl is likely to be as furtive, and afraid of public contempt,
as any upstanding burgher). Every person I asked for directions turned
out to be a tourist.

In a nearby coffee shop the experience was similar.

The patrons were almost exclusively foreigners. Coffee shops, for
those unfamiliar with the local euphemism, may also serve coffee but
usually only as a side order to the main course: cannabis.

For the record, I neither smoked nor inhaled -- only dutifully
reported.

Also abstaining would seem to be the average Dutch citizen. So, what
accounts for the strange existence of rather mainstream moral codes
amid centers of lust and psychoactive substances? Paradoxically, while
Dutch policies might be liberal or libertarian in effect, they derive
from a fairly paternalistic, conservative instinct, mixed with a good
dose of pragmatism. That pragmatism goes back at least to the 17th
century, Holland's Golden Era as a great seafaring power.

In those days, the country was a Puritan stronghold. But even the
pious Dutch, who offered the Mayflower Pilgrims a temporary home,
acquiesced to Amsterdam's emerging Red Light district.

Early on, this nation of world traders concluded that it couldn't stop
the world's oldest commerce.

Yet then, as now, many of the prostitutes' clients were foreigners;
mostly sailors in the old days, mainly tourists today.

The modern Dutch consensus is that making outlaws of prostitutes and
soft-drug users only pushes them underground and into the hands of
real criminals. Better to control and regulate such behaviors by
legalizing -- or in the case of cannabis, tolerating -- the otherwise
objectionable. The Dutch word for this is gedogen, which has no
equivalent in English yet roughly means permitting what is officially
illegal.The Dutch hope that this approach will let authorities focus
on fighting serious crimes, such as the forced prostitution of human
trafficking, and allow soft-drug users to hang out in places where
they aren't so likely to bump into dealers of more dangerous
narcotics, like heroin.

The added bonus -- this is still a nation of traders after all -- is
that once brothels and marijuana cafes are legal, you can tax their
profits.

Practicality is sometimes taken for licentiousness. Yet the Dutch
don't offer sex education and contraception at an early age as part of
a social experiment to promote or condone teenage sex. They are simply
attempting to regulate the inevitable, or at least what's believed to
be inevitable. The euthanasia law is in another category altogether,
since it grew out of a conviction that it is morally right to allow
patients to end their own suffering. But here, too, the Dutch also saw
a need to be realistic, by codifying and regulating what was already
taking place in hospitals and homes without rules and
supervision.

Some statistics seem to show that the Dutch are onto something with
their approach to the baser human desires.

The Netherlands has one of the lowest drug-related death rates in the
industrialized world and far fewer abortions or teen pregnancies than
in comparable Western societies. And where gedogen doesn't seem to
work, the Dutch are willing to stop looking the other way for a minute
and fine-tune their policies.

Late last year, Amsterdam authorities began legal proceedings they
hope will close down about 30% of the windows in the Red Light
district, where owners are suspected of using the sex business as a
cover for money laundering. On closer inspection, it turns out that a
lot of the finger-waggers and other outside critics are mistaken.

The Netherlands isn't so much a cesspool of sin as it is a well of
pragmatism. Even if, it must be said, that pragmatism attracts a whole
lot of sinners.