LGBTQ grooming conspiracy theory
Although the belief that LGBTQ individuals are more likely to molest children has no basis in fact, this stereotype has existed for decades in the United States and Europe, going back to before World War II.
[6][7] Despite originating with the far-right, the conspiracy theory regarding the supposed sexual grooming of children has been pushed by a growing number of mainstream conservatives,[8] especially in the United States.
[41] In the USSR in 1933, Article 121 was added to the entire Soviet Union criminal code, making male homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison with hard labor.
[43][44] In the post-war period, similar sentiments emerged in the USA; 21 states and the District of Columbia enacted laws between 1947 and 1955 which targeted gay and bisexual men as "sexual psychopaths".
[9] As part of the anti-communist "Lavender Scare", the 1950 Hoey committee wrote to and interviewed medical personnel to ascertain, among other things, whether homosexual people would seduce younger men and women.
[46] Shortly afterward, the failed Briggs Initiative sought to ban gay and lesbian teachers from working in California's public schools on the premise that their sexuality would "adversely affect students".
Recounting the period, writer Matthew Todd argued that, "Thatcher presided over and took advantage of the most devastatingly homophobic time in recent British history" with the help of The Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, amounting to "a campaign of deeply unpleasant propaganda".
"[53][54] Section 28 proposed a ban on local authorities "[promoting] the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship", and came into effect the year after Knight's speech, in 1988.
Labour presented her as "a hard-working local woman with sensible policies", but the press portrayed her as a radical extremist by association, as an Irish Republican Army sympathiser living with a militant shop steward who was not the father of her children, and as a "hard left feminist, anti-racist and gay-rights supporter" (as one News of the World report put it) who wanted to twin London schools with Palestine Liberation Organization camps.
In the article (written from an explicitly Christian right perspective) in the Catholic weekly newspaper The Wanderer, he claimed the Frankfurt School was working under the influence of Satan, to destroy the traditional Christian family using critical theory and Marcuse's concept of "polymorphous perversity", thereby encouraging homosexuality and "merging or reversing the sexes or sex roles" in order to break down the patriarchal family.
[59] On 30 June 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" among minors, which prohibits the equation of same-sex and straight marital relationships.
[61] Since 2019, protesters have targeted drag queen story hour events at public facilities and private venues, often accusing performers and organizers of trying expose children to sexualized content.
[19] In March 2020, The Times columnist Janice Turner accused the charity Mermaids, which offers support for trans youth, of grooming for introducing an exit button on their website in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
Self-described "reactionary feminist" Mary Harrington,[65] a contributing editor at UnHerd, defended the term groomer and denounced "preschool porn evangelism".
[8] On February 24, the right-wing The Heritage Foundation issued a tweet stating that the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act "protects young children from sexual grooming".
[82] Since then, numerous right wing pundits have described the behavior of parents and teachers who support minors in their transgender identities as grooming, and the term groomer has widely been used by conservative media and politicians who want to denounce the LGBT community and its allies by implying that they are pedophiles or pedophile-enablers.
[78] In March 2022, Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed that schools were becoming "grooming centers for gender identity radicals", dedicating an entire segment of her show to the topic a couple of weeks later.
[84] In June 2022, members of the far-right group Proud Boys disrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour at San Lorenzo Library in California, shouting insults like "groomer".
The advertisements had been served to users over 2.1 million times, and Twitter, despite saying that groomer slurs were violations of its hate speech policy, failed to act on 99% of tweets which were reported as such.
[86] The report also recorded a 406% increase in the use of tweets associating members of the LGBT community with being "groomers", "pedophiles", and "predators" following the passage of Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act, called the "Don't Say Gay Law" by its critics.
[90][91] Auckland Council official Darryl Soljan linked the protest to international media coverage of anti-LGBT opponents in the United States accusing drag performers and the LGBT community of grooming children and pedophilia.
[91] Also in March, a show called CabaBabaRave for mothers and infants was forced to be canceled after footage of performers was shared on social media by conservative pages.
[92][93] A March 2023 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that tweets on Twitter linking LGBT people to "grooming" have increased by 119 percent since Elon Musk purchased the social media platform in October 2022.
Business Insider noted that "The sharp drop in support among some Americans follows an especially aggressive year of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and politics", including false allegations of "grooming".
[100] Alejandra Caraballo of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society has described it as "an attempt at the dehumanization and delegitimization of queer people's identities by associating them with pedophilia", adding that "when you start labeling groups with that, the calls for violence are inevitable.
"[101] Jenifer McGuire, a professor in the department of family social science at the University of Minnesota, said that the grooming conspiracy theory comes "from an underlying desire to separate people who are different and to characterize them as less than or as evil.
[107] In 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the word "groomer" is a slur when used to attack LGBT people and drag performers, and is therefore not protected speech under anti-SLAPP laws.
[108][3] On 25 April 2024, British actor Laurence Fox was ordered to pay £180,000 in damages for libelling former Stonewall trustee Simon Blake and former RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Crystal as "paedophiles" on X.
[32] American Jewish community related publication The Forward criticized the implications of this finding, noting the interconnected histories between hatred against Jews and against LGBT people, due to both groups being accused of corrupting children.
[111][4][25] In an interview with Phys.org, Laura Palumbo, the communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), commented that "[m]any survivors may not even have disclosed (their experience) to their own friends, family and loved ones because of the shame and stigma that they face."
