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Proof that Republicans are Pedophiles:

The Republican party is obsessed with children u in the creepiest of ways
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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 u 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 girlsA sports. The word ogroomingo is
now in wide circulation on the right ? u 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 QAnonAs
conspiracy theories.

All of this spilled into last weekAs 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. oEvery judge who does what youAre doing is making
it easier for the children to be exploited,o Lindsey Graham told Jackson in
a heated exchange. Ted Cruz accused Jackson of oa record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back decadeso. 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, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Thousands of Trump 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 victory by the US Congress. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Judge says Trump alikelyA committed crimes in bid to block Biden victory
Read more

And Josh Hawley, best-known for defending Donald TrumpAs 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. oIAve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge JacksonAs treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on
children,o he tweeted ahead of the hearings. oJudge Jackson has a pattern
of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes,
both as a judge and as a policymaker.o

Again, the Republican attacks on JacksonAs 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.

HereAs 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, HastertAs 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. oWe all have our flaws, but
Dennis Hastert has very few,o Delay wrote. oI ask that you consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.o Unmoved, US
district judge Thomas M Durkin sentenced Hastert to over a year in prison. oNothing is more stunning,o he said, othan to have the words aserial child molesterA and aspeaker of the HouseA in the same sentence.o

The Hastert case might have stunned more people if Americans hadnAt 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 yearAs end,
have since been mostly forgotten by the press and the public ?u including allegations from five contestants in TrumpAs 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. oYou know, theyAre standing there with no clothes,o heAd said in
an appearance on SternAs show. oAnd you see these incredible-looking women
?u so I sort of get away with things like that.o ?In fairness to Trump, a number of Miss Teen USA contestants either directly disputed the
recollections of his accusers, or told reporters they couldnAt 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 EpsteinAs activities ?u in 2002, heAd told a reporter that Epstein liked women oon
the younger sideo ?u although itAs not at all obvious how much he would
have cared if he had. After MaxwellAs arrest in July 2020, Trump told reporters that he had interacted with Maxwell socially onumerous timeso but hadnAt been following the case closely. oI just wish her well, frankly,o he said.

Incredibly, Maxwell wasnAt the first accused accused sexual offender Trump
had wished well from the White House. In 2017, AlabamaAs 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. oOn a second visit, she says,
he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes,o the Post
reported. oHe touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.o

Initially, Republicans met the allegations u which Moore denies u 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. oThe RNC is the
political arm of the president,o a senior RNC official explained, oand we support the president.o

This is worth repeating. In 2017, the Republican party now babbling
nonsense about public schools and LGBTQ people grooming children for sexual abuse ?u the party that spent the past week in the Senate arguing that Democrats are soft on pedophiles ?u officially backed a credibly accused
child molester for election to that very body. If the Republican National Committee had gotten its way, thereAs a chance we would have spent the past week hearing Roy Moore opine on JacksonAs ethical qualifications. ItAs 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 heAd vote for Moore during his own campaign.

The Republican partyAs 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; itAs 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 ?u which one would expect given that child marriage was legal in all 50 states as recently as 2017 u 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 HawleyAs state
of Missouri oa destination wedding spot for 15-year-old brideso u
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 u 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
lawmakersA hesitation wasnAt lost on the marriage banAs advocates. oLast
week they were arguing that the government should be involved in approving
a minorAs abortion,o Missouri representative Peter Merideth told the Riverfront Times after FebruaryAs vote. oSo itAs a mind-boggling contrast
when a minor whoAs 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.o

ItAs 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 partyAs tolerance for predators. The more interesting question is why Democrats havenAt discredited the rightAs narratives on this front more forcefully. While the partyAs hands arenAt
fully clean ?u Bill Clinton was on EpsteinAs flights too, after all ?u 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 NovemberAs midterms. Time will tell if they were right,
but we have ample reason to doubt it. TheyAre running against a party
thatAs repeatedly defended the abusers of children with few lasting
electoral consequences ?u a party whose hypocrisies rarely matter.

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