You know how when a subreddit went mainstream it appeared to lose its focus? It appears reddit isn't the only site subject to that problem. Nothing about this has anything to do with what originally spawned the KotakuInAction subreddit.

But moving past that point, this is just an editorialized title written by someone that is either unaware of the reality of the situation in California, or who is actively trying to misrepresent it.

tl;dr: all that's actually happening is gay people are now being treated the same as straight people in the eyes of the law. Just like with straight people, if a young adult sleeps with an older teenager, and it would have been legal had the teen been 18 instead of 16/17, California doesn't automatically put that person on the sex offender registry anymore. It used to be that if a gay 19-year-old had sex with a gay 17-year-old, that 19-year-old could be subject to mandatory sex offender registration.

If you want to know more, I can elaborate. At one point, California had some of the strictest sex offense laws of any of the 50 states. This wasn't a good thing. To give you a few pointers explaining why:

• All sex offenses meant a lifetime on the registry. This included small shit that in a lot of states wouldn't get you on the registry at all.

• There was no tier system that treated crimes according to their level of severity or that took into account whether they were a repeat offender. This meant someone arrested for flashing or someone who drunkenly grabbed someone's ass in a bar was subject to the same restrictions as a child rapist.

• California had one of the highest ages of consent at 18 years old (most states have an age of consent of 16 or 17), their statutory rape laws didn't make close-in-age exceptions like most states do, and all of this was still treated as "strict liability" crime which meant it didn't matter if you had reasonable cause to believe they were of age (i.e. you met in a bar, or she told you she was 18 and didn't look obviously underage, etc.)

The result was you had tons of offenders on the registry, for life, and subject to heavy restrictions, even if what they did wouldn't have even been registry-worthy in most other states. 20-year-old has consensual sex with a 17-year-old that would have been legal if they were 18 and 21? Lifetime registration if convicted. Drunkenly grabbed someone's ass in a bar once and had no prior history of sex offenses? Lifetime registration if convicted.

All of this was made worse when in 2006 California passed what called "Jessica's law", which made it illegal for sex offenders to live within 2000 feet of, among other things, "parks where children regularly gather". This shut a lot of sex offenders out of most normal housing, because if you draw a circle 2000 feet out from any park, school, etc., that covers a lot of residential space.

And then the NIMBYs got wind of the law and really added more fuel to the fire. If they could establish a park somewhere, then that meant sex offenders couldn't live in the area. So tons of these micro-parks started popping up. In a lot of cases they were an absolute joke, just being a small piece of corner property with a bench or something. But because it was a "park" it checked the legal box and now the NIMBYs didn't have to worry about sex offenders.

Except since everyone was doing it, it made it so that there were entire cities where registrants had no place to live at all. Or there'd only be a small section where they'd all end up. But a lot ended up straight up homeless because of this. And a homeless sex offender is a disaster for everyone.

Whereas with housed sex offenders you have an exact location, since homeless don't live in the same spot they only have to give a general area. This makes them harder to keep track of, and harder to find. And also way more likely to re-offend.

So California had even more problems with sex crimes, all being made worse by Jessica's Law, and the system turned into an absolute dumpster fire.

Eventually California caught on that they were creating the problem here, and things started turning around. The 2000 foot restriction was declared unconstitutional, they established a tier system that took into account severity of the crime, with lesser offenders only being on the registry for 5-20 years, and they also reformed the age of consent laws so that those close in age wouldn't automatically be put on the registry, but instead be classified as misdemeanor offenders that weren't put on the registry unless the facts of the case warranted it.

But it's this last piece that created the situation that spawned this obnoxious title: the reform only applied to vaginal sex, meaning it was only straight relationships that were being treated at least somewhat fairly in the eyes of the law. Oral and anal sex was still subject to the insane laws that existed before. So the result was now that if a 20-year-old was convicted of having (otherwise consensual) vaginal sex with a 17-year-old, it was a misdemeanor. But for anal or oral, it was subject to the harsher mandatory registration that didn't take into account closeness in age.

This new law finally fixes that. Now if a gay 20-year-old sleeps with a gay 17-year-old, it'll be treated the same under the law as a straight 20-year-old sleeping with a straight 17-year-old. Which is to say still harsher than they would be treated in most other states, where that conduct would usually be entirely legal anyways.