Hate wins when people like me stand by and let it happen. I won't.
I sat on it for a while wondering why me? Then I realized... I’m the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of “parental rights” if another parent is standing up and saying no.
So you dehumanize and marginalize ME. You say I’m one of THEM. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white." -- Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow
It's about time someone replied to the vile, vicious lies about pedophilia and grooming that have become mainstream fare among Republicans. Not so long ago, this crazy was confined to QAnon. Pizzagate was a fringe sideshow. No longer.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is onboard of course:
The Democrats are the party of pedophiles. The Democrats are the party of princess predators from Disney. The Democrats are the party of teachers, elementary school teachers trying to transition their elementary school-age children and convince them they’re a different gender. This is the party of their identity, and their identity is the most disgusting, evil, horrible thing happening in our country.
And the press secretary of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (anyone opposing the Don't Say Gay law is "probably a groomer"), as well as the governor himself (opponents of the bill “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten”). After Fox News picked up on the smear, the charge became a standard Republican talking point.
Josh Marshall has argued that
mainstream political media is particularly ill-equipped to grapple with the ways in which the GOP pushes what is in essence eliminationist rhetoric and incitement. Many of us know about the QAnon conspiracy theory world which posits a vast liberal/Democrat conspiracy of sex trafficking and pedophilia which will finally be undone by a violent cleansing of America by Donald Trump. Conventional media seems entirely incapable of grappling with, explaining or describing the way that the “mainstream” GOP has increasingly promoted and mainstreamed these beliefs with a spectrum of indirect to increasingly explicit messaging. We see it in the otherwise quite difficult to explain focus on the sentencing specifics of a few cases overseen by future Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. We see it in what I discussed yesterday as the right-wing appropriation of the pedophile/sexual predation language of “grooming” to indict and discredit any and all support of transgender minors. Conventional journalism simply has a willed incapability to make the connections.
The next day, Marshall cited another press failure: a Mike Allen report on what Marshall characterizes as Texas Governor Greg Abbott's "various stunts in recent weeks to keep the border immigration issue at a boil for his own 2022 reelection campaign" wherein the Axios co-founder reports on another "trucker protest" with nary a nod of acknowledgement about what the guv is up to. Marshall concludes, "These are truly the days of our discontent. The political climate is bleak, elite DC press corruption is pervasive." (While I agree with Marshall that this is an instance of a press failure, I'd lean toward cluelessness, and maybe an indifferent rush to post online, rather than corruption.)
After Mallory McMorrow spoke out, the Washington Post weighed in with a report titled, "GOP turns to false insinuations of LGBTQ grooming against Democrats."
What's more concerning though, than a flatfooted political media, is the failure of Democratic leaders to speak up. What were the Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee thinking when they sat on their hands, instead of calling out the perverse smears of Josh Hawley? Why has it taken so long for an elected Democrat to push back straightforwardly against this homophobic dive to the gutter? Republicans are telling lies to eviscerate the advancement of gay rights in recent decades, to claw back their own freedom to disparage the LGBTQ community and its allies, and to besmirch the party of inclusion.
I'm no political strategist. Maybe this isn't an ideal Democratic issue for the 2022 campaign season. But come on. Pushing back against this hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric is the only defensible option.