Grooming and Dooming: The Perverse World of the GOP
At its core this is about believing in demonic forces operating through human institutions.
In case you haven’t noticed, the Republicans posterior guard has cut back on the use of the words socialism and communism as vulgarities aimed at sane people who think the rich should be taxed and destroying social security is a bad idea.
Some of the old guard can’t help themselves, as they’ve been slinging that mud since FDR’s New Deal, but the younger crowd –the ones who live to trigger outrage on social media– have found a new and improved expletive to hurl as needed.
That word is pedophile, aka sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object.
Senate Democrats are pro-pedophile, along with Republicans Murkowski, Collins, and Romney, according to Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for voting to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
People who speak out against the Florida Parental Rights in Education law — called the “don’t say gay” law by opponents — are being deemed to be pedophiles.
Candace Owens, the Daily Wire’s leading whiny conservative, is leading calls for a boycott of the Walt Disney Co. over its opposition to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
It’s not slander, technically, because elected officials are public figures. What the law doesn’t hear with these dog whistles, the fringe-types understand as calls to action. And what used to be called the fringe is now being mainstreamed.
QAnon conspiracies (where all this pedo bs started) are now alive and well in the hearts of minds of an alarming number of Republicans, with roughly 80% either believing this trash as truth (one in four) — or doubting, but refusing to reject it (55%).
And now…A Tale of the Kind of Terror this kind of rumor mongering/social media garbage unleashes.
From a long-time Twitter user, handle @RobbiePierce: (Copy/pasted for ease of reading):
Well that didn't take long. We decided to take a trip on Amtrak with the kids for spring break. 9 hours into a pleasant ride, a man was suddenly standing next to me, shouting across me at my 6yo son, "Remember what I told you. They stole you. They're pedophiles."
I stood between the stranger and my son, whose life has already been so hard, who carries traumas larger than his whole small, fierce frame. I was immovable. "Get away from my family." [2/10]
"Family!? That's not a family! You're rapists. You steal black & Asian kids." My son and my 5yo daughter were both now openly crying, petrified. He yelled right at them, unmoved: "These guys aren't natural. Homosexuals are an abomination. They steal and rape kids." [3/10]
It was suddenly no longer an absurd, abstract attack in an online comments section or a distant legislative session. These horrors were being screamed @ my sweet bewildered son, who's worked so hard to process his grief & control his feelings, who only wants love & safety. [4/10]
I grabbed the kids and moved them to another car while my ferocious husband went into papa bear mode and shouted the man away from us. Eventually the conductor arrived and the man lost his focus on us. [5/10]
The kids cried for almost an hour. We got cookies & processed their emotions while the train waited at a stop for the police. They wanted to be away from windows so they wouldn't see him again. They wanted to practice screaming loud enough for help to come. I want to scream too.
This man was clearly angry at an unjust world; we have that in common. He's clearly not receiving the resources he needs. We've dealt with this brand of terrifying homophobic stranger before with our son. But "pedophiles" and "rapists" were new in the mix, at least out loud. 7/10
We all know where that comes from. So thanks to Fox & Murdoch, JK Rowling & Marjorie Taylor Green, to the senators & priests & everyone else who harms kids & thinks it's politically expedient to project onto gentle families like mine to stir up their lucrative culture war. [8/10]
I asked my son if he'd seen the man before. He said the man had confronted him when we let him go to the bathroom alone, which he'd been so proud to do @ 1st but too afraid to do again after. Yet *we're* the groomers. 😣 I'm livid & ashamed that I didn't notice something was up.
They're asleep now. They asked if we'll see that man again & I said probably not him, but men just like him. But we'll be stronger each time. And most people aren't like that guy. I hope this was true. Please help us protect our families, friends. We feel so outnumbered & tired.
To be clear, as much as we need people standing up for us in such moments of confrontation, we need allies to shut down this rhetoric everywhere it rears its ugly head anywhere, especially when we're not there. Don't vote for them or support their art or avoid confrontation.
Postscript: The individual threatening the child in this thread was arrested after Amtrak personnel attempted to escort him off the the train at the next stop.
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The Bible prophesy about the end of the world is accepted by various segments of the fundamentalist and evangelical movements. Much of their political activity is motivated by the belief that the end times are what we’re living through.
At its core this is about believing in demonic forces operating through human institutions. As a result, they are often distrustful and prone to conspiratorial thinking. For example, many believe that the United Nations is part of a plot to create a one world government ruled by the coming Antichrist.
The idea that sexual perversion is widespread among non-believers dovetails nicely into political ideologies dependent on “otherizing” to motivate followers.
On the local level, the idea that non-believers in MAGA Truth are seeking out sex with young’uns, has caught on like wildfire: school board members, teachers, medical professionals, and more are all partaking in grand underground orgies that cops are too dumb to see.
On a recent Fox News show, Tucker Carlson suggested that parents—specifically fathers—should inflict violence on their children’s teachers who don’t follow state bans on discussing gender issues.
From the Mary Sue:
This is far from the first time Carlson has suggested violence to his viewers. He has said teachers who talk about gender identity should be “arrested” and “beaten up.” He told viewers they should call the police and child protective services when they see a child in public wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic, calling masking for children “abuse.”
Carlson is unable, of course, to provide an example of a legitimate offense worthy of the “thrashing” he’s calling for. He grossly mischaracterized an Alabama bill banning gender-affirming care for trans youth as protecting against “castration”—he literally referred to “slicing off a child’s sex organs”—which is not a thing that is happening to young trans people, so there’s definitely no need to legislate its prohibition.
This is called stochastic terrorism, as in when random individuals react to extreme language by taking it as a call to action. Think about it. What could be worse than (possibly your) children being brutalized/sexually assaulted? The idea can be and is a trigger for people already subjected to extreme anxiety.
The political purveyors of pedo-terror tales likely know they aren’t telling the truth, but they don’t care as long as they can get attention for provoking public outrage.
He who smelt it, dealt it. The juvenile reference to farts is my way of pointing out the absurdity of these claims, because ultimately it’s the party of the people slinging this crap that has the problem.
I’m not saying that pedophilia is confluent with what passes for conservatism these days. It’s a mental illness, and no one is automatically immune from brains on flame. But there certainly are a lot of Republican officials that seem to have run afoul of the law for this kind of stuff.
Here’s a 76 page document listing Republican sexual predators, abusers, and assorted enablers, all documented with links to news accounts.
The other GOP byword currently in vogue is “grooming,” the act of persuading impressionable minors that it’s okay to engage in sexual acts.
unFun fact: According to the CDC, 91% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child or their relatives, including parents.
Nobody should be shocked to learn that “grooming” means something else entirely when it’s evangelicals and others of the ilk during the persuading.
According to the anti-forced-marriage nonprofit Unchained at Last, 300,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, some as young as 10. Most were girls wed to adult men, an average of four years older. (This doesn’t include men whose future spouses were children when they met, but who they waited to actually wed until it was legal.) Of course, none of this has anything to do with queerness, and it occurs with Parental Rights intact, so these 300,000 minors don’t fall under the aegis of the panic about protecting kids. I wouldn’t have, either, being afraid to tell anyone anything, and not knowing I could, just knowing I’d sinned somehow. In the party of Roy Moore, child marriage, and even heterosexually flavored child abuse, is contained comfortably within the bounds of fundamentalist patriarchy and is thus irrelevant..
Apparently it’s not child abuse if the parents allow an older man to court an underage female.
The practice became part of the public conversation when Roy Moore, the Republican and evangelical Christian who ran for Senate in Alabama in 2017, was accused by five women of pursuing them sexually when he was in his 30s and they were teens.
There are wide swaths of conservative congregations that find the practice of “courtship” normal and the nation met them during that campaign.
Kathryn Brightbill is a legislative policy analyst at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a nonprofit advocating for the interests of home-schooled children. She was exposed to fundamentalism through the Christian home schooling movement and through her involvement in the anti-abortion movement in the 1990s.
“One of the reasons those who practice early courtship consider it OK for adult men to be courting teenage girls is because they’re not supposed to be having sex before they’re married,” Brightbill said. “The people who are practicing early courtship and child marriage are careful to make sure that they’re not technically breaking any laws, even though for all practical purposes, it’s parent-sanctioned grooming of underage girls in preparation for them to hit legal age.”
FYI– Here’s the latest attempt to fan the flames:
Lead image: The 1781 painting The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli shows a demonic incubus perched on the chest of a sleeping woman. (Via Wikimedia Commons.)
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