In Georgia, Republican State Senator Rene Unterman is at odds with her state’s Christian Conservatives.

Unterman is pushing a bill which would get child prostitutes to be treated and rehabbed as victims and not charged with a crime.

The Christian Right, however, is seeing the change as a tacit legalization of child prostitution.

“Who will benefit from the passage of H.B. 582 or S.B. 304? I’ll tell you who – the very profitable and growing pedophile industry,” said former state Sen. Nancy Shafer in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It is imperative that these bills be defeated.

“Decriminalizing that means the police would have absolutely no interest in it at all,” said Sue Ella Deadwyler, who writes a Christian conservative newsletter. “They wouldn’t arrest the girls, they wouldn’t pick the girls up, they wouldn’t protect them from influence on the street from the pimps and the johns. It would be an absolute cultural upheaval in our state. Never in the United States, as far as I known, has juvenile prostitution been legalized.”

No one wants to legalize it, nimrod.

But if a 14-year-old isn’t old enough in the state’s eyes to determine whether he or she can have sex (hence, statutory rape laws), how can they be old enough to determine they should be paid to have sex. By state law underage sex partners are mentally incapable of having the judgment to commit the crime they’re presently being charged with.

If, on the other hand, you’re saying a young prostitute is mentally capable of putting him/herself willingly into prostitution, how can you charge them with a crime for willingly having sex with their same-age boyfriend or girlfriend?

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