In Pahrump, Nevada – a desert enclave famous for its “live and let live” spirit – you can openly carry a gun, race sports cars, buy marijuana, own lions, gamble and purchase sex. But there’s a movement under way to rein in the frontier town’s freedom-loving ways.

Activists, lawyers and Christian pastors are leading a petition drive to ban brothels in two Nevada counties, Nye and Lyon, and if successful the potential ballot initiatives would close nearly half the state’s bordellos.

A relic of the old west, the brothel industry dates back to the Silver State’s origin as a mining territory and is featured often in movies and television shows, making the “cathouses” a fundamental part of Nevada’s iconoclastic image.

State leaders like the former US senator Harry Reid have long suggested that counties ban prostitution, which they say hurts Nevada’s ability to attract mainstream industries. (Sex work is already illegal in the counties home to Las Vegas and Reno.) But licensed brothels put towns like Pahrump on the map and were quietly tolerated until now.

The latest prohibition effort aims to let the public decide the cathouses’ fate and is seen by both sides as a fight for the very soul of the west.

On a road between the Heritage Bible church and two brothels, Sheri’s Ranch and Chicken Ranch, a sign reminds drivers: “The wages of sin is death.”

“This is strictly, from this standpoint right here, a moral issue,” Pastor Budd Hawk, one of the campaign’s chief advocates, told his congregation at the Pahrump church during a recent Sunday sermon. “I’m not going to get into the politics of it.”

But Madam Sonja, a manager and courtesan at the Love Ranch, said outlawing brothels would displace women, leading some to ply their trade illegally in places like Las Vegas, where street prostitutes and escorts are vulnerable to trafficking, rape and abuse by pimps.

Cee Mia, Dennis Hof and Destini Starr. Photograph: Dan Hernandez/The Guardian

In legal brothels, she pointed out, women had a freedom to set their own schedules and prices in a more safe, controlled environment that included security cameras, “panic buttons”, and the ability to vet clients who booked through the internet.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sociology professor Barb Brents echoed that point. “The individuals with fewer resources are going to hit the streets. You still got to pay for rent, you still got to pay for food … It’s sad to see the Nevada brothels potentially closing right when the #MeToo movement has women standing up to say: ‘I have the right to work without being harassed no matter what job I do.’”

More than anything, women in the Love Ranch fretted over the potential loss of income.

“This is a way for a single mom to make as much or more money than a man might make to be able to support a household,” Madam Sonja said. “We have the right to use our bodies to make a living. To have somebody because of a particular dogma that they’ve bought into decide for me what it is about myself that I can use or not use is ridiculous.”

Nevada’s brothel industry is already shrinking due in part to competition from escort services marketing through the internet. In the 1980s, 35 cathouses played host to miners, truckers, local residents and tourists alike. Now, just 18 remain, 12 of which are owned by the “Trump of Pahrump”– the reality television star and state assembly candidate Dennis Hof.

“This is totally politically driven,” said Hof, wearing a gun on his waist and speaking from the parlor of his Love Ranch brothel, adding: “This is the Mormon mafia in the political establishment trying to throw me off my game while I’m running for office.”

He described a recent Saturday night in which a building inspector came and shut the business down at 2am because it allegedly wasn’t up to code. A meeting to restore his license was two weeks away at the time.

“I’m the anti-establishment guy, and they can’t buy me, so they want to ruin me,” he said.

The Citizens Against Brothels in Nye County campaign and No Little Girl, the parallel effort in Lyon, are only about halfway toward their signature goals, with the deadline to put the brothel bans on November ballots just weeks away, on 15 June.

The Pahrump Valley Times has reported that its readers “overwhelmingly slammed the proposal” on social media. But Salli Kerr, the Nye group’s spokesperson, said it would canvas door-to-door. Under the bright desert sun, paved roads disappear on the horizon, adding a mirage-like atmosphere to their goal.

Dennis Hof, a brothel owner, is running for state assembly. Photograph: Dan Hernandez/The Guardian

“This is about the victimization of women,” said Kerr, who runs a battered women’s outreach center in Pahrump. She quoted a study that said the majority of sex workers were recovering from childhood abuse. “[Prostitutes] are basing these choices on previous experiences of trauma. That trauma literally affects the physiological responses of the brain. It’s difficult to say if she made her own choice, when what we did was allow victimization early in life to impact choices that she made later.”

Conceding that for some women it would be difficult go from six-figure earnings to minimum wage at a hamburger restaurant, Hawk, the pastor, admitted that “from a strictly economical standpoint, [prostitution] makes sense. But from a human and moral standpoint of course it makes none ... I trust 100% in the lord. Everything that I have is a blessing from God. I don’t worry about whether the bills are going to be paid at the end of the month because I know they will.”

There were 44 churches in Pahrump, not including Mormon and Catholic churches, Hawk said, implying that its population of 40,000 was strongly devout. But there are also those casinos, 24-hour gaming taverns and marijuana dispensaries.

“They want to shove everyone into a Judeo-Christian mold and we don’t all fit,” said Madam Sonja, who is a former schoolteacher and reiki master in addition to being a porn star courtesan.

“I have a finely tuned sense of morality. It just doesn’t fit into a church.”