Democrats view California as a model for how the rest of the country should run. The party holds a monopoly on power there, and it is a major recruiting ground for Democratic politicians. Former President Joe Biden plucked four people from the state to serve in his Cabinet and as his running mate.
It is crucial to look at how California runs to determine where Democrats want to take the country in the future. That includes California’s toleration of sex crimes and sex trafficking, lest the state “stigmatize” the LGBT community or “sex workers.”
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Los Angeles’s underage prostitutes
In 2022, California legalized loitering with the intent to commit prostitution. This effort was led by state Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the most destructive state legislators in the country, and was signed off on by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, the likely future Democratic presidential nominee. This is despite prostitution still being illegal in California, at least in theory. Newsom emphasized as much after announcing that he was signing it: “To be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution.”
But it did make it much harder to combat, especially when it comes to protecting minors. The left-wing New York Times noted as much when it did an analysis of how it changed policing in Los Angeles, specifically Figueroa Street, which it describes as “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.” As the outlet detailed, “uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each [emphasis added] girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell.”
California Democrats accept this, though, because it was done in the name of equity. Wiener described the law criminalizing loitering with the intent of prostitution as “a law that targets our community,” speaking of the LGBT community while celebrating Pride Month. Newsom echoed this, claiming the repeal was necessary because the law “disproportionately impacted Black and Brown women and members of the LGBTQ community. Black adults accounted for 56.1 %of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017-2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city’s population.” The New York Times boiled down Democratic support for the law as follows: “The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed.”
So, rather than profiling people dressed provocatively on known prostitution corners and getting inequitable arrest results, California now allows prostitutes to work corners with impunity, and allows minors to be worked on those corners as a result. That is the trade-off that California Democrats are willing to make.
Please don’t stigmatize our sex crimes
The focus on “stigma” against the “LGBTQ community” is the single guiding light when it comes to how California handles sex crimes. That is why, in 2017, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law another Wiener bill. Senate Bill 239 reduced the penalties for someone knowingly exposing another person to HIV through sex. It also lessened the penalties for knowingly donating blood infected with HIV.
Under California law previously, both of those acts were felonies. HIV is a fatal disease, after all. It has no known cure and requires daily treatment to keep at bay. Someone deliberately concealing the fact that they have HIV, having sex with someone, and giving that person HIV is a heinous act. California previously gave those criminals a prison sentence of three to eight years.
Ah, but the stigma. According to Wiener, “These laws were based on fear and on the limited medical understanding of the time … In the decades since, societal and medical understanding of HIV has greatly improved. Effective treatments dramatically lengthen and improve the quality of life for people living with HIV — treatments that also nearly eliminate the possibility of transmission.”
Do you notice those keywords when talking about treatments? “Lengthen and improve the quality of life,” and “nearly eliminate the possibility of transmission.” Those are euphemistic ways of saying that HIV affects your quality of life and your lifespan, and that treatment is necessary to lessen those effects.
Again, none of this is about people who simply have HIV; it is in the context of people who deliberately expose an unknowing person to HIV, taking advantage of them and saddling them with a lifelong condition in the process. Once again, concerns about “stigma” win out over consequences for real sex crimes.
Cracking down on sex trafficking? It’s complicated
In 2023, California Republicans pushed to make child sex trafficking a “serious felony,” strengthening penalties for repeat offenders and making them ineligible for early release from prison. The state Senate, made up of 32 Democrats and just eight Republicans, passed it unanimously. Even Wiener supported it.
Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee blocked the bill, though. It created such a public backlash that Newsom had to lean on Assembly Democrats to push the bill through. A few apologies and abstaining votes later, the bill passed, but not before Assembly Democrats justified their opposition by claiming that punishing child sex traffickers was racist and that they were fighting to “ensure equity.”
The next year, California Republicans tried to handle this issue from the other side of the transaction, this time trying to make it a felony to purchase or solicit a child for sex. The bill would upgrade the sentence from one year in jail to up to four years in prison, increase the fine by $15,000, and require purchasers to register as sex offenders for up to 10 years. That bill passed overwhelmingly, but Democratic amendments to the bill ensured that it only applied in cases where the victim was 15 years old or younger or 16 or 17 years old and a victim of sex trafficking.
Earlier this year, Assembly Democrat Maggy Krell tried to tighten up the law, making it a felony to purchase a 16 or 17-year-old for sex even if they hadn’t been trafficked. Her fellow Democrats demanded she remove that part of the bill, and then removed her from her own bill, hijacking it for their own purposes. They instead wanted to hold an “informational hearing” about whether purchasing a minor for sex was bad in every possible scenario.
Sure enough, Wiener reared his head to put forward an absurd hypothetical. According to him, “Sending an 18-year-old high school senior to state prison for offering his 17-year-old classmate $20 to fool around isn’t smart criminal justice policy.” One would venture a guess that this is not exactly a common practice in high schools. Perhaps this is some cultural difference in San Francisco.
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Wiener intends to replace former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the House of Representatives. Rob Bonta, the state’s Attorney General, is running for governor. His wife was one of the Assembly Democrats who tried to tank the sex trafficking bill. Newsom is the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2028, and his poll numbers in the early parts of that race are rivaled only by fellow Californian and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
This issue is only going to become more relevant as the major players in California gain bigger roles in the Democratic Party. On sex crimes and a number of other issues, California is the crystal ball into the U.S.’s future under Democratic leadership.
