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View Winners → Opinion Oct 20, 2020
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Before I became the center of a QAnon conspiracy theory, I followed the news about this internet cult with alarm, but also from afar. I saw it as a scary thing happening to people I didn’t know. Then QAnon followers sent me over a thousand death threats. What happened to me was a perfect QAnon storm: I’m a progressive, gay, Jewish Democrat working to end discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q.
people. I’m just the right target for an internet cult obsessed with pinning pedophilia and child trafficking on progressives, gays, Jews and Democrats. As tens of thousands of slanderous and hate-filled comments about me proliferated on Facebook and Twitter, the companies did little to stop them.
How did I become a QAnon target? Last year, I introduced Senate Bill 145 in the California State Senate to end discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. young people on California’s sex offender registry.
California law treated “gay” sex — oral and anal — much more harshly than it treated vaginal sex, allowing straight young people to stay off the registry while forcing L.G.B.T.Q. young people onto it. This discriminatory distinction existed because when California created its sex offender registry in 1947, gay sex was illegal […]
