Culture War
2024-10-29 02:13:20 UTC
2023
Proof that Republicans are Pedophiles:The Republican party is obsessed with children in the creepiest of ways
This article is more than 1 year old
Osita Nwanevu
For all their posturing about defending children from abuse, their record
tells another story
Wed 30 Mar 2022 08.46 EDT
Last modified on Fri 1 Apr 2022 11.32 EDT
Republicans have kids on the brain. Over the course of the last year,
conservative activists and Republican state lawmakers have been whipping up
a set of interrelated moral panics over the supposed indoctrination of
children in our schools and child abuse from the notion that elementary
school teachers are raising up junior divisions of the Black Panthers with
critical race theory to the insistence that trans people, who today
comprise less than half a percent of high-school athletes in the United
States, might soon bring an end to girls sports. The word grooming is
now in wide circulation on the right ? a dogwhistle that implies basic
education on LGBT identity and sex is priming kids for predation, perhaps
at the hands of the Satanic sex traffickers at the heart of QAnons
conspiracy theories.
All of this spilled into last weeks confirmation hearings for US supreme
court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which Senate Republicans did their
best to derail by mischaracterizing her sentencing on cases on child sexual
abuse images. As has been widely reported, those sentences had been
entirely in keeping with sentences delivered by most federal judges in
comparable cases, including sentences delivered by Trump judicial
appointees with broad Republican support. But that mattered not a whit to
Republicans on the Hill. Every judge who does what youre doing is making
it easier for the children to be exploited, Lindsey Graham told Jackson in
a heated exchange. Ted Cruz accused Jackson of a record of activism and
advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back decades.
TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-ELECTION-TRUMP<br>TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump
arrives to speak to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on
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the US Congress. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN
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And Josh Hawley, best-known for defending Donald Trumps allegations of
election fraud and cheering on the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, led
the pack with a fusillade of similar attacks on Jackson at the hearings and
on social media. Ive noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge
Jacksons treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on
children, he tweeted ahead of the hearings. Judge Jackson has a pattern
of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes,
both as a judge and as a policymaker.
Again, the Republican attacks on Jacksons record, like the rest of their
fearmongering about kids these days, have been ludicrous. It is true,
though, that one of our parties has proven itself remarkably willing to
defend sexual predators in recent years.
Heres a genuinely alarming pattern the senator should take an interest in.
In 2016, former Republican speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ?was
convicted for trying to pay off men he had sexually abused as a high school
wrestling coach. His victims had been boys between the ages of 14 and 17 at
the time. After Hastert had pleaded guilty to making a set of payments,
Hasterts legal team compiled 41 letters in defense of his character from
friends and former colleagues, including Republican congressmen David
Dreier, Porter Goss, John Doolittle, Thomas Ewing, and the former
Republican House majority whip Tom DeLay. We all have our flaws, but
Dennis Hastert has very few, Delay wrote. I ask that you consider the man
that is before you and give him leniency where you can. Unmoved, US
district judge Thomas M Durkin sentenced Hastert to over a year in prison.
Nothing is more stunning, he said, than to have the words serial child
molester and speaker of the House in the same sentence.
The Hastert case might have stunned more people if Americans hadnt been
busy following the 2016 campaign, with its flurry of sex and other
scandals, at the time. But the sexual misconduct allegations that had piled
up against Donald Trump, from well over a dozen women by the years end,
have since been mostly forgotten by the press and the public ? including
allegations from five contestants in Trumps Miss Teen USA pageants that he
would walk into dressing rooms while girls as young as 15 were changing.
Notably, Trump had previously boasted to Howard Stern that he would
intentionally walk in on undressing contestants in the adult Miss USA
pageants. You know, theyre standing there with no clothes, hed said in
an appearance on Sterns show. And you see these incredible-looking women
? so I sort of get away with things like that. ?In fairness to Trump, a
number of Miss Teen USA contestants either directly disputed the
recollections of his accusers, or told reporters they couldnt remember
Trump being present in the dressing rooms.
What is not in dispute is that Trump also happened to enjoy a friendship of
well over a decade with Jeffrey Epstein. This past December, a former Miss
Teen USA contestant testifying at the sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine
Maxwell told the court that she had met Trump through Epstein at the age of
14. That raises more questions about whether Trump knew of Epsteins
activities ? in 2002, hed told a reporter that Epstein liked women on
the younger side ? although its not at all obvious how much he would
have cared if he had. After Maxwells arrest in July 2020, Trump told
reporters that he had interacted with Maxwell socially numerous times but
hadnt been following the case closely. I just wish her well, frankly, he
said.
Incredibly, Maxwell wasnt the first accused accused sexual offender Trump
had wished well from the White House. In 2017, Alabamas Republican Senate
candidate Roy Moore was accused of romantically and sexually pursuing
teenagers while in his 30s, including a woman who told the Washington Post
that Moore had molested her when she was 14. On a second visit, she says,
he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes, the Post
reported. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided
her hand to touch him over his underwear.
Initially, Republicans met the allegations which Moore denies with the
kind of response one would expect from a responsible major party. The
Republican National Committee pulled its support from the campaign, and
Republican leaders including Republican party chairwoman Ronna Romney
McDaniel and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called on Moore to step
aside. Then, about a month after the allegations broke, Trump officially
endorsed Moore by tweet. And, on the very same day, the Republican National
Committee recommitted itself to the Moore campaign. The RNC is the
political arm of the president, a senior RNC official explained, and we
support the president.
This is worth repeating. In 2017, the Republican party now babbling
nonsense about public schools and LGBTQ people grooming children for sexual
abuse ? the party that spent the past week in the Senate arguing that
Democrats are soft on pedophiles ? officially backed a credibly accused
child molester for election to that very body. If the Republican National
Committee had gotten its way, theres a chance we would have spent the past
week hearing Roy Moore opine on Jacksons ethical qualifications. Its a
mercy of sorts that we heard instead from the likes of Hawley who, as the
White House noted earlier this month, refused to say whether hed vote for
Moore during his own campaign.
The Republican partys ambivalence on child abuse extends beyond pure
politics and the protection of accused politicians. Nearly 300,000 children
between the ages of 15 to 17 were married in the United States between 2000
and 2018. An estimated 60,000 of them were below the age of sexual consent
in their respective states; its thought that roughly 80% of American child
marriages overall are between girls under 18 and adult men. Activists
across the country have been pushing hard against those figures over the
last few years. And while resistance to child marriage bans can be found on
both sides of the ideological spectrum ? which one would expect given that
child marriage was legal in all 50 states as recently as 2017 some of the
most dogged defenders of the status quo have been red-state Republicans.
Not long ago, for instance, the Kansas City Star called Josh Hawleys state
of Missouri a destination wedding spot for 15-year-old brides
especially ones who had been impregnated by men, thanks to uncommonly lax
laws that facilitated the marriages of more than 7,000 children between
2000 and 2014.
When a ban on marriages to children 14 or younger advanced by a Republican
party representative came up for a vote in February 2018, it was opposed by
50 members of the Missouri house two Democrats and 48 members of her own
party. Thankfully, that bill still passed the chamber, and a comprehensive
ban on all marriages of adults over 21 to children under 18 was signed into
law in Missouri later that year. But the significance of Republican
lawmakers hesitation wasnt lost on the marriage bans advocates. Last
week they were arguing that the government should be involved in approving
a minors abortion, Missouri representative Peter Merideth told the
Riverfront Times after Februarys vote. So its a mind-boggling contrast
when a minor whos not even old enough to enter into a legally binding
contract is being told they can enter into a relationship that makes
statutory rape legal.
Its no mystery why Hawley and other Republicans are more interested in
inventing child abuses and a record of leniency for abusers among Democrats
than they are in criticizing their own partys tolerance for predators. The
more interesting question is why Democrats havent discredited the rights
narratives on this front more forcefully. While the partys hands arent
fully clean ? Bill Clinton was on Epsteins flights too, after all ? the
hesitance to engage more aggressively probably has less to do with that
than it does with their preference for a particular mode of response to
Republican attacks in general.
Feigned surprise and the performance of indignation have been the twin
pillars of Democratic counter-messaging for as long as anyone can remember.
Pundits have puzzled about the lack of cover Dick Durbin and Senate
Democrats offered to Jackson over the course of the hearings; one
explanation that makes as much sense as any other is that Democrats assumed
the attacks on Jackson would backfire naturally and make Senate Republicans
look bad ahead of Novembers midterms. Time will tell if they were right,
but we have ample reason to doubt it. Theyre running against a party
thats repeatedly defended the abusers of children with few lasting
electoral consequences ? a party whose hypocrisies rarely matter.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist