Given a choice between child rape and saying no to the LGBT lobby, California Democrats picked child rape.
A recent New York Times story on Los Angeles’ notorious Figueroa Street revealed the brutal human cost of Democrats’ subservience to the LGBT lobby. Prostitution had always been a problem, but, as the paper reported, “in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode.” Girls, some not even teenagers yet, are being abused, beaten, and raped night after night in a miles-long stretch of street ruled by traffickers and known as the Blade.
This expanding evil is the result of deliberate choices by Democrats. There were the pandemic school closures — extended far beyond any evidence or reasonable fears — that left vulnerable children unattended and easy prey for traffickers. There were police budget cuts — in practice, defunding the police means letting those selling children as sex slaves control the streets. And, though the New York Times does not mention it, handing the cartels control of our southern border surely enabled the sex traffickers now selling children in L.A. and elsewhere.
But above all, there was the repeal of “the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution.” Ostensibly, this was to “prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.” And so it was not long before “every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.”
There were, it turns out, good reasons that it was illegal for girls wearing G-strings, fishnets, and heels to hang around known sex trafficking hubs late at night. As Abigail Shrier reported for City Journal back in 2023, the “anti-loitering statute,” which “had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring.” It had thereby kept prostitution in general, and child sex slavery in particular, in check by giving police the ability to break up prostitution hot spots.
But this was unacceptable to California Democrats. The New York Times refused to name names, but the man most responsible for the current miles-long market of child prostitutes in Los Angeles is California state Sen. Scott Weiner of San Francisco. Wiener, who is now running for Congress, leads the LGBT faction of the Democrat-dominated California legislature. Shrier recounted some of his other handiwork, which included laws that have “allowed biological male felons to self-ID their way into women’s prisons,” “decriminalized the intentional exposure of a sexual partner to HIV” and “reduced criminal penalties for sex offenders.” He also tried to decriminalize ketamine, often used as a date-rape drug.
Hellbound and Down 