“There is no better moral panic than [one] centered on potential harm to children"

So if casting those who oppose this law as “pro-grooming” is not rooted in evidence, what is it rooted in? In part, it’s a dog whistle to the party’s most extreme, conspiracy-minded base. The foundation of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that there is a mass, secret, underground ring of Satanic pedophiles whose members consist of Democratic leaders and Hollywood elites. Painting anyone who opposes Florida’s law (i.e., mainly Democrats) as being pro-grooming fits neatly into that narrative and winks at QAnon adherents without requiring politicians on the right to actually endorse the outlandish theory.

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But this rhetoric also harkens back to age-old attacks on the LGBTQ community. Casting LGBTQ people as child predators and their very existence as something inherently sexual was a tactic used by anti-LGBTQ activists since the 1970s in their efforts to stifle or roll back LGBTQ legal protections, according to Marie-Amélie George, a law professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in LGBTQ rights. George said that for a long time, many people believed that being gay was the result of child sexual abuse.

“The religious right really modernized and repackaged that claim in the late ’70s and early ’80s to be that ‘gays and lesbians cannot reproduce, so they have to recruit,’” George said.

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