Democrat’s head-scratching reason for killing his own bill decriminalizing prostitution

Colorado’s Republican House leader is calling foul after a Colorado state senator says he is effectively killing his own bill to decriminalize prostitution—in order to protect “sex workers” from the trauma of having to testify.

State Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, the main sponsor of SB26-097, told the Colorado Sun that his bill lacks the necessary support to clear the Senate Judiciary Committee, so he will ask to delay the measure until after the 2026 legislative session, effectively killing the bill. He said the “sex workers” who persuaded him to bring the bill also persuaded him to effectively kill it.

“Ultimately, we all decided that having a very tense, long committee hearing, where they’d have to be in a room with a lot of law enforcement, religious leaders and other hostile voices — where they’d understandably feel at risk of surveillance, doxxing and threats/intimidation — wasn’t worth it given the lack of reason to believe the outcome will be changed,” he told the outlet.

Yet Laurel Boyle, an interim communications director for Colorado’s House Republican Caucus, told The Daily Signal that 42 people had signed up to testify against the bill, while only one person signed up to testify in favor—and he does not appear to be a prostitute.

Republican Response

“Senator Hinrichsen’s comments are completely out of touch with the legislative process here in Colorado,” Jarvis Caldwell, the Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, told The Daily Signal in an interview Monday. “It is the responsibility of every legislator to hear from people who take the time to come to the Capitol and testify, whether they support a bill or oppose it.”

“Dismissing the voices of law enforcement officers and religious leaders as ‘hostile’ simply because they disagree is incredibly concerning,” the Republican leader added. “These are community leaders who show up to represent the safety, values, and concerns of the people they serve, just as Senator Hinrichsen is called to do as an elected official.”

“We are relieved to see SB26-097 will be killed in committee, and we are grateful for all those across Colorado and across the country who spoke out,” Caldwell added. “When people engage in the process, lawmakers have a responsibility to listen. Hopefully, Democrats will take that message to heart and start prioritizing what Coloradans are actually asking for.”

Caldwell previously noted that Colorado had the 10th highest rate of human trafficking in the United States (both in the raw number of cases and as a per capita rate) in 2023, according to the Colorado-based Common Sense Institute. He also cited a 2012 study from the London School of Economics, finding that foreign countries that legalized or decriminalized prostitution had higher rates of human trafficking.

Decriminalizing Prostitution

The prostitution bill requires the statewide decriminalization of “commercial sexual activity among consenting adults.” It decriminalizes both the selling and the purchasing of sex statewide and preempts cities and localities from criminalizing the world’s oldest profession.

The bill repeals state laws imposing criminal penalties for prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, patronizing a prostitute, and a prostitute displaying herself in public. It preserves two criminal penalties: those for using intimidation or menacing to convince someone to become a prostitute and for pimping.

The American Civil Liberties Union has called for the decriminalization of prostitution, which it calls “sex work,” claiming that criminalizing prostitution makes it harder for prostitutes to access health care and other services and “feeds an out-of-control mass incarceration system.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the bill’s Democrat sponsors in the Senate—Nick Hinrichsen and Lisa Cutter—and the House—Lorena Garcia and Rebekah Stewart—for comment, and they did not immediately respond.

Harsh Criticism

Critics warned that the bill would turn Colorado into a “Wild West” for the buying and selling of sex.

Caldwell argued that legalization involves setting “rules and guidelines” to regulate a practice, while a “full-on decriminalization,” like this bill offers, “just makes it really the Wild West.”

Erin Lee, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, previously told The Daily Signal that the bill bothers her in part because of her own experience suing her daughter’s Fort Collins school for allegedly violating her parental rights by encouraging her daughter to transition behind her back.

“I’ve been working really hard to fight child sex trafficking because my girl got put on the conveyor belt of gender trafficking and then it opened my eyes to how many child victims there are in this state,” Lee said. She warned that “kids are already being brought up to think that it’s normal to sell yourself and everything is highly sexualized for teenagers—I believe it’s a step on the run towards pedophilia.”

Chase Davis, lead pastor at The Well Church in Boulder and leader of the Christ Over Colorado movement, told The Daily Signal that the Centennial State has “become their testing ground for bills like this.”

Davis recalled the HB25-1312 debate last year, in which Colorado Democrats compared concerned parents who opposed transgender ideology with the Ku Klux Klan.

Davis warned that many Colorado Democrats “just want to punish Christians.” He recalled the saga of Jack Phillips, the Colorado Christian baker who faced discrimination claims when he refused to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]