Social justice warriors everywhere rejoiced at the news that California has decriminalized, or effectively legalized, child prostitution.  

After all, prostitution is basically a victimless crime, right?  And progressives have spoken loudly about emptying jails of "non-violent" offenders.  What could be more non-violent than the lifestyle of an underage sex worker?

1) It is widely acknowledged that young girls generally have equal bargaining power with their pimps; accounts of pimps beating their whores are purely anecdotal and not rooted in fact.

2) Young girls have very controlled encounters with their clients.  They go to an alley, or a deserted basement, or the bathroom of a McDonald's, and as the client and child sex worker disrobe, the client asks, at every step, "May I touch you here?  May I touch you there?" in compliance with directives for having sex on college campuses.

3) Young girls who catch hepatitis, herpes, and AIDS from these encounters cannot be said to be victims of violence; rather, they are victims of non-causality-related microbiology and perhaps, in a way still not fully understood, global warming.

Legalization will also help young people get jobs.  Pimps are reasonable economic actors just like everyone else.  When they see that underage sex workers are not being prosecuted while adult ones are, they will be more likely to hire children as prostitutes, radically reducing the teen unemployment rate (and maybe even the pre-teen unemployment rate as well!).  Couple that with California's great minimum wage laws, and children will finally earn an honest hourly wage for an honest hour's labor.

Perhaps in time they can even unionize and get group benefits, like a good dental plan.

Now, technically, men can be prosecuted for having sex with a child prostitute even as the child prostitute goes free.  But it is hard to see men being prosecuted for an act where their partner in crime isn't; it would be like a law saying drug users can be prosecuted, but not drug dealers.  I can even see men on trial using the underage status as a defense: "But Your Honor, you shouldn't prosecute me.  She was only 15!"

Perhaps in time this legal loophole can be formally bridged.  First there can be an exclusion carved out for child prostitution for medical purposes.  A wide range of studies have shown that sex with a child prostitute can alleviate the discomfort from varied ailments such as tooth ache, cancer, back pain, AIDS, abnormal sex drive, and even normal sex drive.

Once having sex with child prostitutes for medical reasons has been legalized, then we can move on to legalizing it for recreational use – the same two-step process that was employed with marijuana in Colorado.

In this light, we can view early-age sex education (sometimes starting as early as first grade) as a form of necessary vocational training, something our young people need more of.  They need to be educated to know exactly what kinds of birth control they will be disregarding when their clients offer them an extra $200 to go bareback.

And once child sex workers come out of the shadows, we can tax their labors and use the money to rebuild our crumbling venereal disease clinics and penicillin labs.

The best part of all this is the genuine acceptance by our culture.  Not a single major presidential candidate or politician has spoken out against this because they realize they would antagonize the child sex lobby.  They know they would be labeled as out-of-touch prudes if they criticized the idea of penalizing a 13-year-old girl for letting a man have his way with her in a back alley in San Francisco's Tenderloin district or Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood or Hollywood Boulevard  in Los Angeles, the "Silicon Valleys" of prostitution.

Speaking seriously...liberals claim that by decriminalizing child prostitution, they are trying not to "penalize" the "victims"; but if you tell the "victims" that there are no consequences for their actions, guess what: you're going to have a lot more victims.  This is more about creeping legalization of prostitution – all sorts of prostitution, for everyone – than it is about "helping the children."

Ed Straker is the senior writer of Newsmachete.com.