Groomer-Adjacent Behavior

The California legislature, sinking fast

For at least two decades, and probably more like three, the Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulted young boys, sometimes inside the university’s athletic facilities. In an incredibly brazen maneuver, he founded a foster home for troubled boys, The Second Mile, and used it to find victims. He was eventually convicted on 45 child sexual abuse charges involving ten victims, and sentenced to at least 30 years in prison. There’s an extensive literature about what Sandusky did, and about how he did it, and see if you can spot the term this literature uses to describe his actions:

Jerry Sandusky groomed young children to maneuver them into sexual abuse. He was a groomer; he engaged in grooming. That’s what he did.

Comes now California State Senator Scott Wiener to declare that these terms are forbidden:

Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener

The word “groomer” is categorically an anti-LGBTQ hate word. It’s super homophobic/transphobic. It plays into the slander that LGBTQ people are pedophiles. It’s no different than calling someone a fagg*t. If you call someone groomer, you’re inciting violence against LGBTQ people

Wiener is the same legislator who proudly points to the success of the California legislature in assuring that 12 year-olds can get abortions, contraception, and medical care for STDs and sexual assault without their parents finding out:

Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener

California law already allows 12-17 year olds to access various forms of healthcare without parental consent, eg: HPV & hep B vaccines, abortion care, birth control, mental healthcare, domestic violence-related care. SB 866 builds on this existing law to expand vaccine access.

Taking his words at their most obvious face value, I regard him as an increasingly open enabler of the sexual abuse of children by adults, and as an apologist for child sexual abuse. Now he wants to deprive the victims of child sexual abuse of a vocabulary to describe what’s been done to them. I live in California. His presence in our legislature shames our state.

He’s a Democrat, but if you’re a member of the same political party, put aside your partisan politics for a moment. What’s progressive about any of these behaviors?