Dems Choose Supporting LGBT Activists Over Stopping Child Rape

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.

Wiener’s critics sometimes wonder why he is obsessed with making sex trafficking and statutory rape easier to get away with, but that’s the wrong question. The real concern is not how depraved he personally is, but why the rest of the California Democratic Party does his bidding on bill after bill, and why Democrats elsewhere are eager to follow suit. In this case, they were warned that changing the law would enable child sex slavery. They did it anyway in the name of the LGBT movement.

Perhaps, now that the New York Times has noticed that child sex slavery is a booming business in L.A., there may be a backlash among California Democrats, especially given Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambition. But perhaps not. We have yet to find a point at which the left will actually stop its slide down the slippery slope of gay rights.

Democrats, especially in California, have done whatever the LGBT lobby tells them to, no matter the cost. This has included purging faithful Christian foster parents, even as, according to the New York Times report, California’s foster care system is overwhelmed, and most of “the underage girls pulled from the Blade turned out to be from foster care.” There is a price to sexual liberation, and it is often paid with the bodies and lives of the weak and vulnerable.

Despite the personal and cultural carnage wrought by the sexual revolution, the left (and too much of the right these days) remains all-in on sexual liberation. But there is a better way to live, one that is rooted in truths about human nature that direct us toward our good and the good of those around us. Amidst the evils of our sexual culture,  Christians must boldly proclaim the truth that Christian sexual morality is a guardian of the weak and vulnerable.

The false loves of sexual liberation produced the exploitative hellscape that is Los Angeles’ Figueroa Street. The true love of Christianity offers a way out that points us heavenwards while also making this life better.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All” (Ignatius, 2025).