Democrats move to make Colorado the 1st state to legalize prostitution everywhere. What could go wrong?

Colorado Democrats have filed a bill that could make it the first state to decriminalize prostitution, and critics warn that the bill would make the Centennial State the “Wild West” for purchasing sex and lead to an increase in human trafficking.

“We have a billion-dollar budget shortfall here in Colorado, and so there’s a lot of talk about budget and affordability and cost of living,” Jarvis Caldwell, the Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

“This isn’t the Republicans’ idea of making things more affordable, by making it easier to sell yourself for sex,” he quipped.

While some rural areas have legalized prostitution in Nevada, the entire state has not done so. Similarly, Maine decriminalized the selling of sex, but not the buying.

Caldwell noted that Colorado had the 10th highest rate of human trafficking in the United States (both in the raw number of cases and as a per capita rate) in 2023, according to the Colorado-based Common Sense Institute. He also cited a 2012 study from the London School of Economics, finding that foreign countries that legalized or decriminalized prostitution had higher rates of human trafficking.

Caldwell argued that legalization involves setting “rules and guidelines” to regulate a practice, while a “full-on decriminalization,” like this bill offers, “just makes it really the Wild West.”

“It’s a no-holds-barred, no one has to worry about it whatsoever, which is obviously going to drive up demand on the buyer side, and … if you don’t have enough ‘sex workers’ for the demand side, that’s where you get your human trafficking increase,” Caldwell said.

Decriminalizing Prostitution

The bill, SB26-097, requires the statewide decriminalization of “commercial sexual activity among consenting adults.” It decriminalizes both the selling and the purchasing of sex statewide and preempts cities and localities from criminalizing the world’s oldest profession.

The bill repeals state laws imposing criminal penalties for prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, patronizing a prostitute, and a prostitute displaying herself in public. It preserves two criminal penalties: those for using intimidation or menacing to convince someone to become a prostitute and for pimping.

The American Civil Liberties Union has called for the decriminalization of prostitution, which it calls “sex work,” claiming that criminalizing prostitution makes it harder for prostitutes to access health care and other services and “feeds an out-of-control mass incarceration system.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the bill’s Democrat sponsors in the Senate—Nick Hinrichsen and Lisa Cutter—and the House—Lorena Garcia and Rebekah Stewart—for comment, and they did not respond by publication time.

Concern for the Children

Erin Lee, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, agreed with Caldwell’s concerns.

Lee sued her daughter’s Fort Collins school for allegedly violating her parental rights by encouraging her daughter to transition behind her back.

“I’ve been working really hard to fight child sex trafficking because my girl got put on the conveyor belt of gender trafficking and then it opened my eyes to how many child victims there are in this state,” Lee told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

The bill would decriminalize “holding a place of prostitution and window displays, so talk about normalizing this practice on Main Street for children,” she said. “It just becomes a normal facet of life for children walking down Main Street to see a place of prostitution, Amsterdam-style.” (Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, is known for its red-light district.)

“Given OnlyFans culture—these kids are already being brought up to think that it’s normal to sell yourself and everything is highly sexualized for teenagers—I believe it’s a step on the run towards pedophilia,” Lee warned.

Macy Petty, a legislative strategist with Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal that Colorado legislators seek to “normalize the buying and selling of humans.” She warned that the legislation “places prostituted women in dangerous situations, increases the risk of violence and exploitation, and reduces women to commodities for sexual purchase.”

Colorado a ‘Testing Ground’ for Radical Bills

Caldwell, the minority leader, noted that Garcia and Stewart previously sponsored HB25-1312, a bill that would have removed kids from parents’ custody if the parents refused to honor the children’s transgender identities. While the bill ultimately passed, Democrats substantially amended it following national outrage.

Chase Davis, lead pastor at The Well Church in Boulder and leader of the Christ Over Colorado movement, told The Daily Signal that the Centennial State has “become their testing ground for bills like this.”

Davis recalled the HB25-1312 debate last year, in which Colorado Democrats compared concerned parents who opposed transgender ideology with the Ku Klux Klan.

Davis warned that many Colorado Democrats “just want to punish Christians.” He recalled the saga of Jack Phillips, the Colorado Christian baker who faced discrimination claims when he refused to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.

“Last year, they compared anyone who doesn’t believe in radical gender ideology as equivalent to the KKK,” he noted. “They have no interest in partnering with evangelicals—they have nothing but contempt for them.”

When asked if he would describe the bill as groundbreaking, Davis said, “It is groundbreaking only in the sense it’s going to open portals to hell … letting out demons in our state.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]