XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.home.repair

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 QAnon�s conspiracy
theories.

All of this spilled into last week�s 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
you�re 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 January 6,
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supporters, fueled by his spurious claims of voter
fraud, are flooding the nation's capital protesting
the expected certification of Joe Biden's White House
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And Josh Hawley, best-known for defending Donald
Trump�s 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. �I�ve noticed an
alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson�s
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 Jackson�s 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.

Here�s 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, Hastert�s 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 hadn�t 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 year�s end, have since been
mostly forgotten by the press and the public ?�
including allegations from five contestants in
Trump�s 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, they�re standing there with no
clothes,� he�d said in an appearance on Stern�s 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 couldn�t 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 Epstein�s
activities ?� in 2002, he�d told a reporter that
Epstein liked women �on the younger side� ?� although
it�s not at all obvious how much he would have cared
if he had. After Maxwell�s arrest in July 2020, Trump
told reporters that he had interacted with Maxwell
socially �numerous times� but hadn�t been following
the case closely. �I just wish her well, frankly,� he
said.

Incredibly, Maxwell wasn�t the first accused accused
sexual offender Trump had wished well from the White
House. In 2017, Alabama�s 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, there�s a
chance we would have spent the past week hearing Roy
Moore opine on Jackson�s ethical qualifications. It�s
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 he�d vote for Moore
during his own campaign.

The Republican party�s 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; it�s 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 Hawley�s 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
wasn�t lost on the marriage ban�s advocates. �Last
week they were arguing that the government should be
involved in approving a minor�s abortion,� Missouri
representative Peter Merideth told the Riverfront
Times after February�s vote. �So it�s a mind-boggling
contrast when a minor who�s 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.�

It�s 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 party�s tolerance
for predators. The more interesting question is why
Democrats haven�t discredited the right�s narratives
on this front more forcefully. While the party�s
hands aren�t fully clean ?� Bill Clinton was on
Epstein�s 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 November�s
midterms. Time will tell if they were right, but we
have ample reason to doubt it. They�re running
against a party that�s repeatedly defended the
abusers of children with few lasting electoral
consequences ?� a party whose hypocrisies rarely
matter.

Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist


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