Gay Lawmaker Scott Wiener Speaks out After Right’s “Groomer” Slur Led to Threat Against Him

Sen. Scott Wiener (D), a state senator from California, is the target of a coordinated attack by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Charlie Kirk, right-wing provocateurs who he claims are directly to blame for threats against him in the wake of the Club Q massacre in Colorado Springs.

“People like you won’t be able to walk down the streets when light comes to the darkness that you’re fu**ing providing you piece of s**t,” the voicemail that Wiener’s office received on Wednesday warned.

The LGBTQ Nation quotes Wiener as saying, “You have to call it for what it is. And denounce those who spread misinformation and hatred, such as Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, for what they are.

There was a definition of “groomer” at the outset.

Following the shooting on November 19 that left five people dead, Wiener wrote a number of tweets denouncing the assault and the “violent rhetoric” that encouraged it.

One aspect of that rhetoric was clarified in a subsequent tweet, which read: “The word ‘groomer’ is categorically an anti-LGBTQ hate word. Extremely homophobic and transphobic. It supports the accusation that LGBTQ individuals are pedophiles. It’s the same as calling somebody a fa***t. Calling someone a groomer encourages violence against LGBTQ people.

A week later, Greene called him a communist groomer instead of a pedophile, referring to him as such.

Pass my Protect Children’s Innocence Act, Greene wrote in reference to Wiener, “to stop communist groomers like this from using state government power to kidnap children from their parents so that a for-profit medical industry can chop off these confused children’s genitals before they are even old enough to vote.”

In his run-on sentence, Greene alluded to Wiener’s contribution to the passage of the California law granting asylum to parents of transgender children. The bill gave them protection from being prosecuted by states like Texas for helping with their children’s gender-affirming care.

Charlie Kirk, the leader of the right-wing advocacy group Turning Point USA, escalated the situation on Tuesday by posting a thread in which he criticized Wiener for his involvement in the passage of both that law and other pro-LGBTQ bills in Sacramento. But he led with a charge that falsely tied Wiener to a story that itself is false.

Thanks to the state’s drastically lowered penalties for child molestation, thousands of pedophiles in California are getting out of jail after only a few months, Kirk tweeted to his 1.8 million followers. Californian lawmaker Scott Wiener is one of the factors that contribute to the early release of so many of these predators.

The judges’ discretion in statutory rape cases was equalized by that legislation, which was passed in 2020. Before the revised law, judges could keep the defendant off the state’s sex offender registry in cases involving a defendant and a victim of similar ages—for instance, if a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old had sex. However, since the law only applied to penetrative vaginal sex, there was no discretion for same-sex relationships. Legislation by Wiener gave those cases equity. Right-wing organizations at the time condemned him as a pedophile for his actions.

Adding a picture of Wiener from the Folsom Street Fair, Kirk continued, “That name and photo might ring a bell. One of the nation’s most successful legislators is Wiener. He is in favor of the new California law that will defend parents who abduct their kids and bring them to the state so they can undergo deforming surgeries.

“What was so disgusting about his tweet — and his tweets were actually worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene’s,” says Wiener of Kirk, “was he completely made it up, defaming me, tagging me with something that didn’t happen, and that I certainly had nothing to do with, and then winding up in his last tweet saying that I was trying to release pedophiles and mutilate children.”

Wiener, a frequent and seasoned user of social media, was forthright online.

Based on Kirk’s misinformation, a message left on Wiener’s voicemail in his Senate office hours later confirmed Wiener’s prediction.

“I received this threat repeating one of MAGA liar Charlie Kirk’s homophobic lies not even 24 hours after he tweeted homophobic lies about me,” Wiener wrote on Facebook. But that was the point—to incite animosity toward me and other LGBTQ people. Words have meaning, and Twitter is turning into a cesspool for this garbage.