SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Just days after a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club killed five people and injured many more, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose Twitter account recently was reinstated by Elon Musk, took to the platform to hurl an anti-LGBTQ slur at California state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat.
It started Sunday when Wiener tweeted, “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 (gay slur). If you call someone groomer, you’re inciting violence against LGBTQ people.”
Greene, reinstated over the weekend, tweeted Wiener’s post Tuesday, and used it to promote a bill she has drafted that would prevent transgender children from from receiving gender-affirming treatment.
“Pass my Protect Children’s Innocence Act to stop communist groomers like this from using state government power to take children away from their parents to allow a for-profit medical industry to chop off these confused children’s genitals before they are even old enough to vote,” Greene wrote.
Wiener, who has authored several pro-LGBTQ bills, including one that makes California a sanctuary for families seeking gender-affirming treatment for their children, is no stranger to getting hate tweets.
He responded via Twitter Wednesday that Greene’s tweet was a “pretty deft blending of McCarthy red-baiting & gay-baiting.”
“For the record, her ‘Protect Children’s Innocence Act’ comes pretty damn close to banning trans people from existing. Oh & Kevin McCarthy is going to re-empower her,” Wiener wrote.
Democratic Assemblyman Matt Haney of San Francisco responded by coming to Wiener’s defense on Twitter, condemning Greene’s tweet.
“This kind of rhetoric, immediately after a mass shooting hate crime that killed 5 people simply because of who they are, is intended to lead to intimidation, fear and violence. We stand 100% with the LGBTQ community and we all need to be speaking loudly to confront hate,” Haney wrote.
