People often say that stereotypes have a degree of truth to them because of pattern recognition.
When you hear about crime on the news, you expect a certain type of person to be the perpetrator, because previous news stories about crime tend to involve similar perpetrators.
Young black guys are the first thing people think of when crimes are "ordinary" robberies or assaults. Disturbed or drug-addled white guys are usually associated with bizarre and absurd crimes like Florida Man-type stuff or utterly bone-chilling crimes like serial killing, mass shootings, and keeping people in their basement or a freakish dungeon.
Neither of these associations reflects the entirety of all black or white guys, for with every person you can find who fulfills a stereotype, you can find an equal or greater amount of those who defy it.
This brings me to the LGBT crowd and a recent state bill being debated in California. I just wrote about it right before this column, and SB 1414 would toughen the penalty for buying or soliciting sex from a minor from a misdemeanor to a felony.
Related: Leftists Oppose California Trafficking Law Because It 'Disproportionately Targets the Marginalized'
I know that already sounds insane enough on its own, but the thing I wrote about was how opponents of the bill argued against it:
They suggested that LGBT people are disproportionately "targeted" and incarcerated for sex crimes including pedophilia, a similar argument used when Florida made sexually assaulting a minor under the age of 12 a capital offense.
And as I said over there, this argument just looks to the average person like a massive self-own, seemingly perpetuating a stereotype that all LGBT people are sex offenders or pedophiles.
Not all of them are, of course, but as my friend C.A. Skeet recently wrote at the beginning of July, the modern LGBT movement is no longer about keeping what consenting adults do behind closed doors free from government intrusion and removing the stigma of it from society.
Related: Pride Month Recap: What, Exactly, Are You Proud Of?
But where are those people now? The LGBT individuals who are opposed to the normalization of pedophilia? Why aren't they more vocal about the predators among their numbers like other groups are with their own bad members? If they are out there (and they are), why are their voices being drowned out?
Perhaps part of it is the Five Geek Social Fallacies at play, which explains how marginalized groups (like geeks) tend to protect their own, even the bad ones, because they are already excluded by everyone else, and cannot seek adequate support from outsiders.
Such feelings of being alone can foster a sense of nihilism in some. After all, if the bad people are ruining whatever good you did to normalize your group, you might as well go down with them.
There other problem lies in this: puberty awakens sexuality, and the LGBT crowd is about sexuality by definition. Ergo, when young people realize they are gay, which will ostracize them, they will seek support from people who share their feelings, and thus it is very easy for predators to blend in.
But there are groups out there who are doing the right thing like Gays Against Groomers and activists like Chad Felix Greene, who near the end of June made a detailed X thread about gay male culture and its lack of policing concerning minors.
