Since every right-wing anti-LGBTQ argument seems to revolve around accusing queer adults of grooming children, let’s take a look at some of the Republican lawmakers making these claims, and their own history of committing or turning a blind eye to sex crimes.
For some GOP politicians, the accusations of grooming aren’t limited to just gay or trans people, but anyone left-leaning. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the entire Democratic party pedophiles during her interview on 60 Minutes.
“Democrats support—even Joe Biden the president himself—supports children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children,” Rep. Greene says.
While conflating support for trans youth to pedophilia is obviously factually incorrect, it’s an age-old tactic that’s been used against the LGBTQ community for decades. Once conservative parents feared gay and lesbian teachers would abuse their children or somehow indoctrinate them into homosexuality; now the very existence of trans people or drag performers are being accused of the same.
This is all an incredibly damaging and exceedingly wrong narrative; it’s made even more absurd when you are faced with the fact that between the two majority political parties, Republicans have a much longer and more notable track record of sexualizing minors and being either accused of or admitting to sex crimes.
Let’s talk about it.
In 2006, Florida Rep. Mark Foley was forced to resign after it was revealed that he’d sent sexually explicit messages and propositioned teenage congressional pages via email and text. In 2015, former Rep. Dennis Hastert, the longest-ever serving Republican speaker of the House, pleaded guilty to paying hush money in an attempt to cover up his history of abusing high school wrestlers on a team he had been the coach of at the time.
“Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence,” the judge said at his sentencing.
Former President Donald Trump had such a large track sheet of sexual misconduct and criminal behavior that some opponents referred to him as “President Rapist.” Beyond being accused of rape, the former President notoriously entered the dressing room of the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant where there were girls as young as 15 changing.
In 2018, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of preying on girls as young as 14-15. His predation for high schoolers was apparently so bad that he had been banned from a local mall. In the same year, Rep. Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s fiercest allies and a co-founder of the hardline conservative Freedom Caucus, was accused of turning a blind eye to a major sex scandal. During his time as a high school wrestling coach, the team’s doctor had been accused of assaulting over 117 male student athletes.
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is currently being investigated for sex trafficking and possibly engaging in intercourse with a 17-year-old girl. Most recently, a prominent member of Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign, Ali Alexander (pictured in featured image with former President Trump), apologized for soliciting underaged boys for sexually explicit photos of themselves in exchange for introducing them to other prominent right-wing players. One victim spoke up about the incident on a podcast earlier this year and claimed that Alexander had pressured him for nude photos in 2017 when the victim was 15 years old.
The list has gotten so long that websites like Daily Kos have begun keeping track of Republican predator abusers and enablers. The archive goes back as far as 2018 and has 41 parts, the most recent of which was uploaded in March of this year. Some, like Twitch.tv political commentator Hasan Piker, have even gone as far as to say that all conservative accusations are based on projection.
While Democrats and Republicans arguing about which party has more pedophiles within its ranks benefits no one, pointing out the hypocrisy of calling queer people groomers, while simultaneously being accused of or having admitted to sexually abusing minors, can hopefully chip away at the damaging remarks of far-right extremists.
